


for all we know

by Kaiseriin



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Bad language because Negan exists, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Violence, Curses, F/M, Graphic Description, Graphic Description of Corpses, Pretty much all tags that could go with TWD that include violence of every kind, Sexual Violence, Threats of Violence, morally questionable characters lol
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:14:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 38,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27389299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaiseriin/pseuds/Kaiseriin
Summary: "I saved his life one cold morning out on the clearing. Sometimes, I wished I hadn't. Other times, I thought that there had never really been any choice in it, because we had always been bound to meet each other eventually. I just never realised that it would mean we wouldn't be able to leave each other, either."• [NeganxOC] •
Relationships: Negan (Walking Dead)/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	1. one: the beginning

**Author's Note:**

> hello guys! i received a pm recently from wintereveorchid on ff.net (thank you again) who asked about a story i had very nearly forgotten about and which had six chapters by the time i took it down. i have those chapters but wanted to edit, add some stuff, generally just make it a little different. i would like to continue it and will add chapters whenever i can with no strict schedule but with the fun of just throwing out stuff when i can .i really liked season 10 and i especially love negan (duh) i will spoil nothing other than i wanted to make a character who knew him before he became THE negan we all know but who may witness that change up until a certain point...who might even...assist in that change... hehe...
> 
> anyway, i'm gonna post what i have up to chapter three and ill be editing the other chapters before posting, i think i can make a good storyline if i put my mind to it ;) all the best guys and please do stay safe.

_one: the beginning_

* * *

Between the shivering branches overhead, sunlight strained through in sparkling flashes of gold. I had never known beauty like those little hidden rivers dotted around Georgia until we pulled into some grassy spot and stepped through bristling meadows. We found a soft knoll and turned flush and red beneath that dense heat there, with flies pricking our legs and freckles blossoming across our cheeks. Dima often stripped off and leapt into the water, tucked into a ball. Vasya always followed him, but Alyosha liked to sit alongside me and leaf through his books before his stomach rumbled and we ate mushy sandwiches plucked from my bag.

**x**

Somewhere, someplace, I took a Polaroid of them alongside another river. Alyosha had brought the camera but never bothered with it. It had been bought impulsively in the airport and had sat unused in his bag until I came across it. Alyosha stood between the others, being the smallest and thinnest of the three, held between Dima and Vasya who had their arms slung around his sunburnt shoulders. Their noses were lathered in sunscreen.

**x**

Dima held a cloth against his left cheek and Vasya looked beyond the camera in my hands, his stare drawn toward something behind me, though his grin was still wide and pearly-white. The photograph had been taken on some Sunday afternoon, its date lost on the calendar, blurred into all the other days spent lounging on quiet fields.

**x**

In a gas station, Alyosha had finally found a signal. He flicked through articles on his phone, slurping at his soft drink while Vasya filled the tank. His eyebrows furrowed. He swiped away an article, and then another. He stuffed the phone into his pocket and bumped his shoulder against mine before he clambered into the backseat of our car, pushing aside suitcases just to fit. He had the best English of us all and liked to teach me little phrases and vocabulary between the signs and maps and stores. I learned quickly. I had always learned quickly.

**x**

There was a windchime on the cabin that Dima had rented and it sang in tinkling ripples, bumping lightly against the wooden doorframe. There was a wooden bench on chains outside that swung back and forth. I spent long nights out there with my legs stretched out, feet resting on the wooden railings of the porch, staring into the inky blackness of the woods around us. Moths fluttered toward the harsh, buzzing bluish lights dotted outside the cabin and sizzled into gnarled corpses, dropping onto the ground. I watched their wings twitch. I watched them curl up and twitch no more.

**x**

Tucked in the corner of the porch, there was a wicker-chair with some of its woven twigs snapped, so that holes poked through. Vasya had taken it for himself and smoked his cigarettes before bed, looking at the distant mountains behind the cabin. He tried to call our grandmother sometimes, but the signal cut off in a fiery spurt of static. But it was like that, in these rural places, Alyosha said.

He had bought chunky books full of facts about Georgia and its wildlife. He taught me the names for each bird, too, even the ones so high up in the trees that we never saw them. Alyosha always wore his socks pulled up around his calves and told us all about _ticks_ , clucking the word out in his thick accent. He wanted us to practice our English even if ours was fine – not fluent but fine enough to handle trips to the store.

" _Ticks_ ," Vasya mused. "Well, the American dream had to come with some kind of catch."

**x**

In the morning, we watched the birds dance against the clouds, swirling in thick black lines until they separated and spun outward in twirls, grouping together, blooming outward. Vasya left for the gas station again, taking Alyosha with him. Dima found a board-game from a cupboard, his palm smoothing away a heavy sheet of dust from its front. I won a couple of rounds of checkers against him, turning dark wine in colour when he smiled at me; just for me, that smile, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look boyish beneath a fresh coat of dirt from hikes in the woods.

"I missed you while I studied here, Sasha," he said. "Did you miss me?"

He had always been handsome. His cheekbones were high and drawn down toward his mouth, and he had this warmth in him, so intense that it spread into me and made me feel it right in the gaps around my organs, like it cushioned there and softened me. I liked his hands, too, because of their paleness with the faintest threads of bluish veins beneath, and how they wrapped around mine and made them warm, too. I had such cold hands until he held them.

"Only sometimes," I told him.

I liked to tease him and catch that sly pull on lips like I held the strings and curled them tighter between my fingers and made him smirk like that. I tugged on those imagined strings a little harder and his mouth quirked even more, but maybe it was because I had moved a little closer to him on the bench and bumped my shoulder against his own. I never liked touch, before. I figured I still did not like it then, either. But it was all right with him. It was not the same as all those other touches that made me tense and turn away. It was something different. It had always been different, with him.

"Only sometimes," he repeated, smiling. "And yet more than a man like me could ever ask for."

**x**

There was a creek behind the cabin that had a delicate stream gushing over its beige rocks. I stalked ahead and told Dima to push his boots into the prints that I had left behind, because he had never hiked very much, never challenged himself to climb trees or swim through rivers in his childhood like Vasya and I had done. Sometimes, I would turn around and hold out my hand for him on a slope, haul him up and brush off clumps of dirt that scuffed his pants. I would wait for him atop little ridges in our journey and push a water-bottle into his hands once he made it.

Eventually, we would find a little crook along the creek that was dry. Often, we sat and watched small pebbles dislodge themselves from between the rocks underneath that trickling stream, swirled away in a riptide that turned them this way and that, until they settled on some faraway plot of mud. The rippling blanket of trees pulled over the creek like the rungs of a ribcage and the mossy roots stuck out from the wet brown soil like knotted ropes.

"I used to wonder why you liked to bring your rifle out to the meadows," Dima said. "How you could spend so much time out there, alone, until somebody came to find you. Vasya told me that he wanted to teach you to shoot rabbits, but you could never do it."

Another pebble was spat out from all the others. It bumped against the ridges of its old friends, shifting and turning and always moving until its jagged sides caught on the edges of another rock and it fell into its depths.

"I could do it," I told him quietly. "I hid in a tree all morning until I spotted little ears in the field. And I shot it."

Dima touched my cold hands and never flinched. "Why not tell your brother?"

"Because it was the first time that I had ever missed a shot with my sniper-rifle," I said. "After all our Grandmother had taught us, I missed. I watched this little rabbit bleed out in that field that I had always thought was mine, until I saw how its chest went down but never could quite fill up again, and how it looked at me – how it tried to look at me, because its eyes went 'round and 'round in fright. Even in its last moments – 'round and 'round. You know, I had wanted a rabbit, when I was a girl."

The green around his pupils resembled the moss that clung onto the rocks and broke away in petering tufts along the stream. I felt my hands thaw. I imagined myself as one of those pebbles, snapped from a peaceful existence cottoned between all the other pebbles, swallowed and spun into maddened currents, until some merciful clump of dirt caught me and held me close and then consumed me into its brownish sludge.

"I wanted to shoot old coins and tin-cans like we had done when we were kids," I told him. "But Vasya said it wasted a rifle if the shot did not _end_ what stood on the other side of the scope. Well, the rabbit ended, and I thought it was the only waste that had come out of it all. It was never the point of the rifle, for me."

"What was the point, then?"

"The fun of shooting old coins and tin-cans with my brother and beating his score a thousand times over." I smiled at him and found myself struck by how much better I had felt just for telling him what I had never told another soul on this earth.

**x**

While we walked back toward the cabin, I caught sight of something pale between the trees; a powder-blue shirt and jeans, no heavy jacket for the cold that came with nightfall nor proper boots. I watched the stranger turn off into another trail far from ours and wondered if he was a hunter like Alyosha had learned about in his books on nature in Georgia.

He had described the deer around these parts as if he was native, though he never understood much about killing and skinning. It made his own skin bleach sour white to even imagine killing, like all the blood he imagined drained from an animal drained it from him, too.

"Sasha?" Dima called back. "Are you all right?"

"Fine."

I looked down at our footprints left behind in the mud and kicked some dirt across the last few prints closest to me. I felt a nipping chill lick at my throat and pulled my collar closer around me. Alyosha had told us it was usually quite cool in the late part of summertime around these woods, but it had become a little colder than expected. Vasya had chopped wood for the fireplace, scraping out its soot only the night beforehand.

I glanced once more at those shifting in the trees like tides in an ocean, its green waves overlapping so that only small holes appeared between the shrubs that showed us the pits of coal-black colour which awaited us beyond. The man had disappeared into that greenery. He had gone someplace where we could not yet find him.

**x**

Dima brought me a clump of wildflowers that poked from his clenched fist as if they had grown there. I took a Polaroid of him and slipped it into my pocket. I took the flowers and placed them in a transparent bag that was tucked into my pocket. I kept them there even though he thought that would make them wither sooner.

"Better off," I said. "Or it would be too slow, too drawn out for them, without sunlight, without air."

**x**

Stood in the clearing in front of the cabin, we heard a low, droning hum that stirred the dust and drew our eyes toward the clouds. There were small dots out there, like insects on a windscreen, their fat bodies scuttling forward in darting crawls. Dusk shrouded them well, but we soon glimpsed the beady, red lights that flashed from either side. The helicopters dipped low and skimmed the trees. I craned my neck to see their green underbellies.

Dima said, "We must look like little ants to them. Little specks of dirt atop more dirt."

**x**

That same night, we saw an orange glow beyond the treetops.

**x**

Around dawn, the earth rumbled like a sluggish creature stirred from sleep. The clouds had shifted into a rich blend of purple stirred into strokes of light blue. I stood on the porch and watched that strange orange light simmer over the trees until sunlight bled through and quietened its fury. But plumes of black rose in thick balls of smoke, bursting in the light and scattering outward into the wind. I tried to remember the map that Alyosha had, because I was not sure if that was Atlanta so many miles away.

I hiked with Vasya into the woods again. We were faster on our own, without the other two. I asked him, "What could burn so brightly that we would see it out here?"

He peeled a tangle of moss from a tree and tossed it onto the ground. "Probably some kind of parade that used fireworks. Watch for stray rocks, Sasha. You don't want to fall here."

We saw that smoke less and less the further that we walked. I fell into his footprints like Dima had stepped into mine and watched his shoulders as he walked.

Down the rolling slope ahead of us, there was another cabin that was a little more rickety than ours, with sheets of metal stapled to its slanted roof. Though no smoke billowed from its chimney, the sight of it reassured me too, like it meant that all that smoke from the other side of the woods came from distant cabins just like ours – from some parade, from something mundane and simple.

There were shreds of newspaper pasted to its windowpanes, I noticed, along with an old truck sheltered by a drooping canopy beside it. Grime had grown around the edges of its windscreen and blossomed into its rust until the whole truck seemed like it had been birthed by nature and had always been a part of the woodlands; like the flowers, like the leaves.

"I think I saw whoever lives there," I said. "Yesterday, I saw him. But he wasn't wearing the right gear. It was strange. I'm not sure why, but it felt strange."

Vasya was quiet. Then, he said, "I think we should try and visit that petrol station tomorrow. Get some signal and call back home."

**x**

There was a problem with the lights in the cabin, which flickered and buzzed in harsh pitches. Vasya fiddled with the small electrical box and pulled at wires while Dima held a torch for him. I lit candles, though Alyosha thought it was dangerous in a cabin as small as ours. He had taken to checking our visas and passports in his rucksack with great care. He kept the rucksack beneath his cot, and while the others worked on the lights, he asked me for a candle and looked around his things, as if he thought some thief might have stolen them while we slept.

"The wires are fine," Vasya said. He rocked back onto his heels and pursed his lips.

"Then why are the lights off?" Alyosha asked.

Vasya was quiet, though his eyes moved to the window closest to him, its curtains not fully closed. "I don't know." He sighed and scrubbed his hand over his face. "I don't know."

**x**

In the photograph that I had taken of him alongside the fireplace, Vasya looked older than he ever had before. Half of his features were cast in orange from the logs stoked in the fire beside him, the other shrouded in a cast of greyish shadows that made his features seem sharper, rougher. I shook the Polaroid and placed it in my diary with all the others that almost spilled out onto my lap.

**x**

Sunday afternoon rolled around. I wandered alongside Dima while Vasya and Alyosha marched ahead, their rucksacks slipping from their shoulders. Sometimes, Dima and I paused to gently pluck small bugs from fallen logs, then plopping them back into the lush, damp foliage, peering at their black shells before they disappeared into the dark spots where our eyes could not see them.

Dima carried around that nature book Alyosha had brought and tried to tell apart the bugs using the pictures inside. He turned their greenish bodies toward bright sunlight and then leafed through the book to find them while the little insect ran around his wrists or flew off.

I held what looked like a beetle in the palm of my hand and its spindly limbs tracked the lines of my skin like a map, its antennae made of what looked like tiny black beads strung together. I had crouched to pull him from between the narrow scratches in the bark of his tree and looked for someplace to place him that would be safe for him. I had slick strands of grass plastered around my boots.

While I peeled them off, I heard Dima speak through his heavy accent. He called out, "Hello? All you all right?"

And there was no answer from the other side. Only birdsong and the trembling branches trying to hide behind each other.

Dima had turned to look through the trees on our left and I followed his stare but saw nothing. Dima stepped forward. Though I had not realised it in that tiny and fleeting moment, a root had tangled around his ankle, like a bony hand had formed from the earth and caught him, hauled him down hard against its body and held him there. I never heard a snap or crunch like I had imagined a broken bone to sound. It had been silent, softened by the soil. There had been so scream, no sharp and racking signal that the world had changed. It had been quiet, muted. It had been gentle.

I rushed toward him and knelt beside him, placing his head against my lap for comfort. He had groaned in pain, but somewhere in that blend of worry for him, it dawned on me that those odd, grumbled moans had stopped and came from behind me instead.

Caught in the knotted string of branches, there was a man whose hands stupidly swung at those leaves around him. He had stepped into a shrub of thorns and nettles and I glanced down at his leg and blanched, because his foot was caught in a bear-trap of sorts, but he seemed unaware of it. I wondered if it was just shock that made him choke like he did, with a rasping wetness at the back of his throat.

He dressed like a hunter. If it had not been his boots and camouflaged clothing that told me, it was the rifle dropped onto the ground by his boots and the binoculars which bounced against his chest. There was a worn bag tossed just in front of him.

Alyosha stepped around us, stood closer to us. Shakily, he said, "Sir? We would like to help you – your leg – you must have lost a lot of blood already –…"

Vasya flicked on the flashlight that he had pulled from his rucksack and flicked it toward the stranger, because daylight had dimmed, and it was even harder now to make out the shape behind all those branches. I saw that beady light catch on the bark, then finally latch onto the stranger, whose pearl eyeballs reflected the yellowish hue of the flashlight, and then he _smiled_ in some bizarre blend of black liquid spilling from his mouth, his jaw slanted as if it might slop from his face and splash into the soil beneath him, dripping into it. Blood wept from a blackened dot on his chest, too, and some dim part of me understood that it was a bullet wound.

"Oh, God," Alyosha whispered, reverting to Russian. He pushed back, gripping the tree beside him. It wobbled and sang, its leaves rustling.

Startled birds fled into the purplish sky overhead. I wished we could have done the same, but Dima was floppy and weak, his head rolled limply against my chest from the pain in his calf. I held him tighter. The stranger's mouth oozed and bled with that awful sound caught between a moan and a hoarse gargle. I had never heard a sound like it.

"Call somebody, Alyosha. Find a signal and _call_ somebody."

I had never thought much about my own voice, but those words came out and I marvelled at the oddly calm tone that encased them. I had shaky hands and a dead heaviness on my neck like a weight had been placed there, but I spoke as if I was sat on the porch with a cool glass of lemonade in front of me. It disturbed me, that calmness.

"Vasya, do you think – do you think they were right about –…" Alyosha started faintly.

"Do what Sasha said. Call somebody," Vasya said.

Alyosha nodded and patted around his pockets. I realised that he struggled so much because his hands suffered the same spasms that ran through mine. He clutched his phone, typed and then held it against his ear, but his face scrunched in frustration and I felt my stomach hollow out even more. He tried again.

"Well?"

Alyosha looked at my brother. "I can't get anything out here."

"He must be sick," I mumbled, tilting my head at the stranger. "He has to be sick, right?"

Alyosha was quiet. His skin had flushed milky white. He was sweating like Dima, even though it had grown cool around us. Frogs croaked someplace nearby, and the crickets struck up their tune right along with them. Dima ignored what Alyosha said and tried to latch onto a root, but it broke off from the soil and drifted down the river.

I felt a throbbing pain in my skull, pointed right behind my forehead. It seemed that a crust had formed behind my eyes and made them crack around my sockets in an effort to think ahead – Dima was hurt and his bone protruded from his calf and, though he moved his leg, the bone stayed as it was, a white shard set in contrast against the dirt that streaked his skin.

I heard birdsong bleed over the groans of that stranger. I yanked my crusted eyes down to look at Dima and then pushed my palm flat against my forehead, kneading out that agony. I knew that our sunlight was quickly fading, and we had to decide fast on what we were supposed to _do_ : help Dima or sit around with this stranger, unable to call anybody, unable to carry them both.

I also knew that that Alyosha would only dither around and Vasya would not be much better, not if the group was split on a decision. I dragged in a deep, shuddered breath and blew it out again and looked at the hunter scraping the chain of his trap against the tree behind him, arms reached out for us. My eyes fell on his rifle and bag.

"All right. Okay," I said. "Vasya, Alyosha, you carry Dima back to the cabin."

"What? But what are you going to do?" Alyosha asked.

"I'll be right behind you."

Vasya had already stepped forward and bent to catch Dima around the chest. Vasya was better if he was told what to do, he acted faster. Dima's head lolled back, and his mouth moved uselessly. I nodded at Vasya and dropped my rucksack from my back. I patted around, my hand brushing against a water-bottle and hair-ties before I touched crinkled paper and pulled it out. I had a pencil attached to my old diary and took that too, unfolding the map and smoothing it over my lap.

"W-What are you doing?"

"I'm going to mark off where we are right now," I told Alyosha. "That way, once we make it back to the cabin, we can contact the authorities and tell them exactly where this man is. They'd find him faster like that."

"There isn't any signal down there either." There was a frantic air about him. His tongue darted out to dampen his lower lip. "There isn't a signal –…"

I kept my tone light and direct. "But there are pills and more water and a cot for Dima to lay on. I can head for that gas station and ask for assistance. Look, Alyosha, we're going to go back to the cabin and figure this out, okay? We'd be a lot safer there than out in the woods in the dark, right?"

"But what about him?"

I looked at Alyosha, trailing along his arm until we saw that he pointed at that man. He was still held in the gnarled fingers of the tree with his leg caught in a trap, and the teeth of it sawed at the flesh of his ankle. Splinters of bone creaked and waned through the shifting flaps of skin that moved as he did.

I swallowed. "I told you, we'll contact somebody. We can't carry them both, you know that. I wouldn't be able to hold that man's weight by myself, and you wouldn't be able to hold Dima without Vasya. So, we're going to help Dima. And we'll contact somebody – like I said."

"Somebody?" Alyosha repeated.

"The police – an ambulance – the _authorities_ –…"

"Shouldn't we leave the rifle and the bag? I mean, they belong to him."

"And we'll hand them right back. He's not in any state to use them. But Dima needs you. _We_ need you, Alyosha. So, focus. Because we can't get both of them back to the cabin, not like this. We need to think about what we _can_ do. Just – just please help Dima."

Disoriented, Alyosha looked at Dima as if he had forgotten he was even there. He reached to loop his arms around Dima's legs in an attempt to hold them straight, but Dima moaned in pain and twisted away from him. I helped Alyosha grip him a little lower, nearer to his ankles. I warned him to watch for stray roots and logs. I told Vasya to warm the cabin and bring Dima some of the painkillers we had bought.

"I'll be right behind you," I repeated.

Moving into the blackcurrant pool of woodlands around us, they never looked behind, but those groans echoed between every squish of mud beneath their boots and bled through the swaying branches. I stood with my boots sunken into the mud and felt that I had become another shred of trembling leaf or speckled insect crawling along bark. The trees seemed to ripple shut behind their retreating forms, Dima limp and swaying between them.

Only the stranger waited with me.

**x**

The bag had dipped into the shifting mud, pushed further down into its depths from the back-and-forth of the bear-trap grinding against the mud like a tide, pushing it and pushing it in waves. I lowered myself onto my haunches and moved forward slowly. There was something rabid about the man that made me wonder if it was shock that had induced some bizarre reaction from him, or trauma to his brain, or sickness.

I recalled a night spent slumped over the couch in the rundown apartment that belonged to my cousin in Moscow, staring blankly at the screen that bled saturated flashes of blue tones across the wallpaper while I watched a documentary about some kind of fungus.

It showed a small ant scuttling around in a forest almost identical to this one, and some fungus would burrow into its flesh and find the brain. Then, it sprouted there and started to control the ant, forced it to walk and climb trees. Eventually, it consumed the ant and burst through its skull like a spore.

It fell onto other ants until it wiped out whole colonies after it had consumed all of them exactly like it had done with the first ant. I had watched it with a muted sense of repulsion, eyes trailing along that fluffed spore that broke out from the ant and the whitish tufts that flowered over its body once it died, balanced on a tree in the middle of the woods, alone.

I imagined a small fungus lodged in the brain of this stranger that caused him to struggle like he did. I imagined his gargles like a muddled attempt to tell me that it was all just a fungus in his brain, _making_ him scratch at me. It was stupid. But I imagined it, anyway, because it was too terrifying to look into his pearl eyeballs and think that there was nothing there behind them that could explain this behaviour any better.

Clearing my throat, I spoke in English. Alyosha liked to think he was the best at it, and while that was partly true, I was not too far behind. "I need your bag," I told him. "Please. _Please_."

I grasped the strap and had almost torn it back when his skin split away from the bear-trap and he seemed to crack the bone of his ankle in his fall, if it had not been broken already. He thumped against the ground without even trying to catch himself. He threw his head back and yawned with his gaping mouth, his fat tongue flopping out from his lips and sliding over his lips. He hauled himself through the mud toward me and I still could not bring myself to think that he wanted anything more than _help_.

But his fingers moved upward along the leather of my boots and the hold on my ankles was painful.

He started to haul me down toward him and his yawning mouth went to latch around that small patch of bare skin which poked from between my jeans and socks. I tore my other leg out to kick at him, my hands straining to catch onto anything more than clumps of mud that slipped through my fingers. I saw the rifle poking from beneath him and gripped his shoulders to turn him over, but he was much stronger than I had even realised. His strength seemed inhuman, like he could crush my bones in one clench of his hand.

So, I smashed my boot into his face and awaited some howl of pain, some sign that he had _felt_ it.

"Stop," I said hoarsely. "Why are you doing this? _Stop_ –…"

His nose had caved inward, spurting black trails of blood across his mouth, over his chin. And still his hands clawed at my ankles. His throat rippled like the thrashing body of an eel in the dim light, gasping. I kicked and kicked again, until blood smashed into bone and I heard my own shrieks between each crack of my boot into his skull. His head dropped against the mud. I breathed out in thick, heaving sobs.

He moaned and lifted his head _again_. His right eyeball bumped against his shattered cheekbone, dangling from a ropey line. It twirled and caught on his collar.

I felt bile fill my mouth, but quickly snatched the bag from him while he strained to find me with the wet roll of the other eyeball still secured in his skull. I took the chance to grip the rifle, though it was much more difficult to yank it out from beneath him. His hands weakly tried to hold it and pull it against him. I almost allowed it, too, thinking that he had come to his senses and realised he was hurt. But my legs had turned to lead, and he tried to grip me again.

"I will come back. I get help," I said. "I'll get help."

Pinkish bumps poked through his fractured skull. He spat out shards of bone, and I thought the roof of his mouth had collapsed, too. When he looked at me, his purple lips widened into that odd imitation of a smile, and his eyeball swayed with every movement.

Stumbling away from him, I tried to clean the rifle with the hem of my shirt rolled tight in my trembling fist. He had toppled onto a Ruger American rifle fitted with a Springfield cartridge, strapped around it with a rubber-band, which seemed odd enough.

I had expected the rifle to be loaded, but it had been completely empty, though its safety was off. I took another look at the hunter, my eyebrows knitted together. It was even more strange, on top of everything else, that he had wandered into the woods with his rifle, wearing the right gear but without his equipment prepared for a hunt and especially without any real supplies.

I assumed he had set the trap, too. But he walked right into it like he had forgotten it. I found the bag and nearly screamed in frustration. He had nothing more than a rolled-up newspaper and some rope. The last thing was a packet of gum zipped into a smaller pocket in its lining.

Yet I felt a bump beneath the gum, like he had stitched an extra pocket, and in there, I found he had a pistol, keys for another cabin, and a map of his own. It was marked, just like I had marked mine – a small, circular dot over a patch of light green.

The teeth of the bear-trap glinted and leered at me, licking at the last droplets of blood.

And though it seemed mad, I was sure that if I had not reacted like I did, that man would have killed me where we lay in the woods.

**x**

None of it made much sense, and maybe that was the reason for which I stood and slung the rifle over my shoulder and walked off into the woods like nothing had happened. Because it felt unreal, and I told myself, ' _I am not really here. This is a dream, but I am on the cusp of reawakening and when I do, I'll settle into the comfort of that fuzzy_ _forgetting_ _that comes after a bad dream. No. None of it had happened. Because it was a dream, and those bear-trap teeth are clacking to laugh at me for believing it.'_

**x**

Marching into the stale warmth of the cabin, I looked for Dima. He was stretched out on his cot with a warmer jumper pulled over his dirty shirt. Alyosha checked our suitcases frantically, counting our wads of cash still left in bundles, pulling open the passports and mumbling our names as he checked each one, then collecting our documents and needlessly shuffling them. I threw the rucksack I had taken onto the bed and scrubbed my hands over my face.

I pulled back the curtain to watch my brother in the clearing working on the car, though its engine was grinding and the headlights on the car cast a bluish glow around him. He glanced up as if he sensed me. He looked ghostly out there, like an apparition who floated through the dark toward our cabin, until his boots clapped against the porch as he returned to us and I knew that he was real.

"The car isn't working," Dima said. He settled back against his pillow and held his arm over his face.

"It will. It has to work," I murmured.

Vasya stepped inside and closed the door behind him. I wanted the door bolted. I only felt safe with the door shut and wandered to the window, arms crossed, my nails scratched madly at the tender flesh of my elbow. I wanted to pull out that tangy fear that lurked beneath its surface just to see it pool on the floorboards beneath me, dripping into the thin, scraggly gaps in the planks of wood, down and down until there was nothing more left in me.

"I'll walk," I said. "I'll walk to the gas station. It'll take an hour, maybe two. I'll take the rifle. You keep the pistol, just to be on the safe side."

"No. No, go tomorrow," Dima wheezed. "It's too late. Give me some painkillers and I'll be fine."

Alyosha dropped onto a chair in the corner by the single counter, a battered portable stove with a burnt pan still on top of it. He stared blankly ahead, his spine coiled, his curly hair slicked flat against his scalp from sweat.

"I'll take the rifle," I said again. "And I'll find somebody. I'll call an ambulance, have them take Dima, and from there – from there, we can figure this out."

"I don't think they'll let him into the hospital," Alyosha said suddenly.

"What?"

"Before we came to this cabin, I read some weird articles about a virus," he said. "About how some hospitals were going into quarantine. Nobody in, nobody out. They were _burning_ clothes and trying to – trying to burn the infected, too. But they didn't call it that. They used another word. I don't remember. But I think if we bring him there, they won't take him."

"That's ridiculous. Of course they'll take him. Look at his leg," I scoffed. I scratched harder and harder at my elbow.

"They won't. They'll turn him away. I read about it."

"You read about it." My voice was tight and mean. "You didn't think to tell us?"

"I did," he mumbled. "I told Vasya."

Vasya looked strangely defeated. "Alyosha thought it was exaggerated or maybe even a joke. I mean, _we_ thought it was just a joke, Sasha. Nothing more than a couple of odd cases on the East Coast about a virus that affected some people."

"What kind of people?" Dima asked.

Alyosha wavered. He wobbled on his chair, like a mirage floating from the floorboards, wispy and fading in tendrils.

"Dead people," he answered. "Just – Just people who died in accidents, at first. And then people who had already been placed in morgues. A-And they shut down some hospital – I can't remember the city. It started to – well, it wasn't just happening in _one_ city. But it makes people – it makes them –…"

I swallowed thickly. "Makes them _what_?"

"Makes them like that man we saw in the woods," Vasya said.

"You think that man we found out there was a _corpse_? He was _moving_ , Vasya!" I snapped. "Don't be so stupid."

"You saw him," Vasya replied. "You saw how he looked. It wasn't natural."

I gripped my hair in my hands and pulled tight. There was something terribly wrong with both of them. Perhaps if that man in the woods _had_ been afflicted by some kind of illness, it had passed onto them and made them hallucinate about corpses. But I had seen how that man looked.

"Well, we have to try _something_ ," I said uselessly. "There'll be medical centres. Doctors."

Dima shuffled against his pillow. "I knew a Russian guy and his sister at my university. Arvo and Natasha, I think. He might still be here in Georgia, probably still in Atlanta. I could try to contact him. He might be able to help us, tell us what the city is like."

"We'll take the phones," Vasya muttered, rubbing at his cheeks tiredly. "We'll walk to that damn gas station and we'll get a signal. We'll call Dima's friends or – or we'll just call somebody."

" _Somebody_! Somebody!" Alyosha snapped. He laughed and laughed loudly, shaking his head. "Who will answer you? Vasya, I went to you about those articles and I _told_ you it was strange – that I couldn't log into my account to see my flight information because the site kept crashing, that I couldn't log onto any other site after that, either. Don't you think that's a little weird, too?"

My eyes darted to my brother. "You never told us that."

"Because I thought it wasn't important. It was a story about a _virus_. A virus that was on the East Coast and with only a handful of cases," Vasya replied. "Like the flu. I never thought it could be that serious."

"I told you," Alyosha said bitterly. "I told you, Vasya."

I pulled more and more at my hair, wanting to peel off my scalp and pluck out that fungus which had planted itself into the soft, mushy lines of my brain and made all of this seem too real. But it had already spread into the rest of me, consumed me, and forced my limbs into movement.

**x**

While they bickered, I thought, _if that man was out in the woods in Georgia, then that virus has already made it out of that hospital even if they tried to contain it._

**x**

I brought Dima water and held the glass against his lips. He was hot. His skin was lined in sweat. He rolled from the pain. I pushed my cot against his own and lay as close to him as I could, holding his hand and caressing his hair from his face. He slept fitfully. He mumbled words I could not quite make out, his lips chapped and sore. I had always thought that I had memorised his features, but I traced him there while he wept and choked on his agony. I followed his wrinkled forehead toward the arch of his light brows, his broad nose and his mouth pursed. He had a faint dimple in his chin, like a fingertip had been pressed there, a personal touch from God.

Moonlight poured a glossy silver over the room. I heard Dima mumble and assumed it was another bit of chatter drawn from fever, but he said my name more clearly and I lifted myself from my pillow to see him. My hand touched his arm. It was clammy and flat against his side, like the parts of a robot pulled off and left aside for repairs. His eyes opened and I saw the whites had been painted in a horrid yellowish tone like that man out in the woods.

"Sasha," he whispered again.

"I'm here."

"I don't think there are any hospitals either," he said. His eyes shut. He hid himself from me, from the horror of the cabin. "I think Alyosha was right. There was something really wrong with that man. You saw it. I don't think there are any hospitals, anymore."

"Don't be silly," I said. I had to say it. I was _compelled_ to say it. "And if there aren't any hospitals here, we'll drive to the next state and the next. How many hospitals do you think there are in this country? Alyosha shouldn't upset you like this. I'll talk to him tomorrow, I'll tell him –…"

"Okay," he said. It had tired him out, all this talking. "But Sasha – I really did miss you. Sometimes."

I pulled myself closer to him. "Sometimes."

**x**

Early in the morning, Alyosha pointed out a budding line of pus that cushioned the corners of Dima's wound. Dima was still asleep, and none of us wanted him to hear it. But it was there. Once he had made me aware of it, I found it hard to draw my eyes away from it. Alyosha was squeamish, he always turned away anytime that I peeled apart the sticky folds of Dima's bandages. He never touched him, never tried to help me move him more comfortably against his pillow. He hovered behind and made little suggestions about what I should do. But he never touched Dima himself.

**x**

Patting a damp cloth at Dima's calf and cleaning out that bloodied gash, I took darting glances at Alyosha, who stood behind me with a rucksack held in his hands for me. He had prepared it, filling it with a bottle of fresh water, some granola bars and sunscreen, along with my passport tied around the map with a band held around it to keep them together. He had awful tremors in his hands and often dropped things without much thought, glancing down at whatever had fallen with a blankness in his stare that worried me.

Dima had worsened. He was hardly ever awake. It was something more than a broken bone, I was sure of it; an infection really had taken hold overnight, and it had made him sluggish and feeble.

"Vasya should walk to the gas station," Alyosha said.

"He's right. I can do it, Sasha," my brother said. "Stay with Dima and Alyosha."

I felt sluggish and feeble, too. "Can you use the rifle? It isn't anything like what we used to shoot with – it's lighter, newer."

He snorted and stood from his cot. "You keep the rifle. I'll take the pistol. Smaller, I can hide it."

Droplets of sweat prickled along Dima's hairline. I brushed them away. "All right. But you remember to take your own passport. They might need it, I don't know."

Vasya kissed my temple. He took the rucksack from Alyosha and then grabbed the pistol, tucking it into his waistband. He bent down beside Dima and whispered into his ear. Dima stirred only slightly, his eyelids tenderly pulled open and his washed-out eyes searching for the source of sound.

"Two hours," Vasya said. "No more than that. I told you – I'll be fast."

**x**

Nightfall just came faster.

**x**


	2. two: the witness

_two: the witness_

* * *

Alyosha snapped the rubber-band that had been tied around the newspaper taken from the man in the woods. He laid it out across the countertop. He drank in the paragraphs upon paragraphs that detailed the virus and his lips remained shut, unlike how he usually translated in snippets. I slid scissors through my old shirts and snipped them into strips that could be spared for Dima, because we had long since run out of bandages, but his calf wept against the makeshift splint that we had tied around it. Neither of us knew much about resetting bones and we were afraid to hurt him more. I focused on the strips and moved closer to Alyosha, who stared down at that newspaper in front of him.

"What does it say?"

His eyes flit to Dima before he looked back down. "It says that the infected should not be approached," he whispered lowly. "Families should contact the number provided, but not treat their loved-ones themselves. There are scientists working on a vaccine in China and some others in India think they managed to cure a mouse that had been injected with the virus, but this newspaper was published last week."

Alyosha was quiet again, trailing a fingertip along the lines.

"It warns people against bringing infected people to hospitals," he continued. "They should bring them to these special centres instead, where there are special doctors prepared to treat them. The infection has been described as highly contagious – and deadly. They say some soldiers killed some of the infected in a hospital in Washington and that the military is considering court martialling them. But they don't write about the recovery rate."

"Well, they're probably still collecting figures," I said. "We can bring him to a hospital, then."

"Didn't you listen?"

"They said not to bring _infected_ people, Alyosha. If Dima has an infection, it's not from that virus."

Shuffling around him, I looked for more old shirts that could be used. I had brought mostly light, loose shirts. If I tried, I could alternate between three of them and cut the rest for Dima. I stood to ask Alyosha if he had seen my suitcase but stilled when I saw that he was watching Dima in his bed. He snatched that newspaper from the countertop and rolled it again, wrapping the rubber-band around it once more.

**x**

"Vasya should be back soon," I told Dima. "It can be tiring on foot, you know. He probably cut his ankles with those new hiking boots he brought. Never could break them in. He'll bring some help."

**x**

I climbed into the car myself and tried to turn on its coughing engine. I slammed its horn, smacked my own head against its wheel and screamed while the horn blared, afraid that Dima and Alyosha might hear it inside the cabin. I leapt back out, tore open its front and desperately touched its parts, smearing oil on my hands. But I knew nothing about cars, I knew nothing about how to fix their shattered parts. I cracked the hood back down and smudged oil on my cheek.

For a moment, in the silence that fell over the clearing, I pinched my own arm to control the onslaught of tears that threatened to burst through. Before I even finished, I heard the faraway wail of a siren. But the spotty few clouds that drifted overhead were white and the sky made from perennial blue, and I knew that there would not even be any rain. How could there be anything wrong with a sky like that, so bright and spotted in clouds?

But still that siren wailed from another world.

**x**

"There are ditches that run parallel to those roads. I could walk in them to avoid passing cars. I'll take another rucksack full of some supplies and I'll find Vasya. He might have injured himself just like Dima did – all we need, another injury. I'll let you take the rifle. I'll teach you how to use it. I'll get a signal. I'll tell them that we took a vacation in the dumbest place possible: a cabin out in the woods, on its own and far from any city or town. Our friend got injured. We're hearing all sorts of weird noises and seeing lights from faraway. It'll sound crazy, but maybe that'll make them come get us faster. I shouldn't be too long at all."

Alyosha dragged his eyes away from the wall and stared at me, though his stare still seemed unfocused. "Vasya said that, too. Now look at us. Any longer and we'll have to fucking _eat_ each other."

**x**

Dima seemed too sick to be carried anywhere, now. There had been some crucial moment, some vital second that passed us in the ticking of a clock concealed from sight. Perhaps it had been in the woods, when he first fell, or perhaps when the engine had cut out on us. It would have been better had we stayed together, I thought, or if we had never taken this trip at all. It tired me just to think of it. I slept in bursts, rocking fitfully around the cot until I climbed out and took to sitting on the porch, peering into the black pit around us.

**x**

Sunlight swam through the doily curtains in the bathroom. I slumped against the toilet seat, a leg curled against my chest, the other stretched out to revel in the coolness of the tiles. The cabin had shrunk; its windows had been sealed shut with glue, its door stuffed around its frame until it blocked out any shred of fresh air. I could not turn without bumping into Alyosha or facing Dima on that cot, his normally tanned skin waxy and corpselike beneath the yellow glow of candlelight. I kept thinking that I had to do more. I wanted to take that rucksack and walk until I found the authorities – police, firemen, _anybody_.

At the sound of knuckles rapping against the bathroom door, I felt like crawling into the grime of the shower and pouring myself down its drain into someplace different. I brushed away frustrated tears that had slid out despite all efforts to contain myself. I stood and cracked the door open, peeking through the slit at Alyosha. He held his coat tight around him, scrunching it with his fists. I saw the purple stains that lined his eyelids and softened a little.

"What is it, Alyosha?"

"That man from the woods," he said. "He's here. He's scratching at the front door."

I felt the same beads of sweat clump at my temples that seemed to plague Dima. I felt bugs scuttling along my spine in confused patterns. They rushed toward the top of my spine, nipped at the ball of my nape, then rushed back along the ridges until they smacked off the tailbone and turned right around again, over and over until I thought if I touched my skin, I would feel the bumps of their fat, wriggling bodies moving beneath muscle.

"We can't kill a sick man," he said. "But we can kill a man who is already considered dead."

I breathed through the rattle in my chest, like something had dislodged itself and it banged around the rungs of my ribcage. "Who said anything about _killing_ him?"

He loosened his hold on his coat. "I told you what the newspaper said. The infected are dangerous and there isn't much that can be done for them. I – I don't want him to stay on the porch. His sickness could be coming into the cabin right now, just by him being there. And Dima is already so weak, Sasha. What are we supposed to do? Let Dima suffer even more because we let that guy spread his _disease_?"

I felt my hands skin into my hair, nails embedding themselves into my scalp. When had I gotten this habit of pulling at my hair? I tugged and tugged but the anxiety was still there, bubbling up and up until I felt I could not take it a second longer.

"But it could be solved by now," I said. "There could be a cure that they wrote about in another newspaper that we never got our hands on. We could be in prison for killing some poor, ill guy –…"

"He's already dead," Alyosha said.

"You can use that pistol as much as I can, Alyosha. Why does it have to be _me_?"

"Because you've trained with weapons before and you never missed a shot. I know your Grandmother taught you well. If I missed, it would be a waste of bullets."

Somehow, we had moved past the act of killing and the rest of our conversation felt lighter because of it. It was Dima or the stranger, just like it had been in the woods. It was me or Alyosha, and he was right that I had the better shot. So, I scooped up the rifle. I still felt its weight more than I usually did, when before I had thought it somewhat lighter. Now it was dense and heavy and made my arms ache and it became clammy against my sweating palm.

"Open the door for me, Alyosha. And then I'll shoot."

"I don't want to watch," he said.

Heat scorched my eyes and made me blink rapidly. "You don't have to watch. You just need to open that door."

Alyosha crossed the room and gripped the handle. He suffered from that shakiness again, but pulled it open like I had asked him. Shadows fell over that man out on the porch, but the sunlight soon caught him and washed him in its golden shade. He was on the ground. He crawled toward us, not through pushing forward on his elbows, but rather through clawing at the floorboards with bloodied hands.

Somewhere along the line, he had lost the foot that had been caught in the bear-trap. The stump wept with blood and bumped against the ground.

I thought about coal eyeballs and soft, greyish pelt matted in blood, lain out in a field.

I shot him through his skull.

I watched his hands twitch even after he had collapsed fully against the floorboards. I imagined the bullet cracking through my own skull, forehead shattered inward, all the world made of blackness and the last sound being only the dull thump of my body on the ground. Before I could even help it, I saw the row of medals that lined the mantelpiece in our home and remembered how my Grandmother used to clean them in the mornings while we watched cartoons.

I looked at my boots and saw brain matter splattered on their soft, scuffed leather.

"Alyosha. You can close the door now."

He had closed his eyes and tried to push the door shut, but the body caught in the frame. I moved over to him and nudged it out with my boot to spare him. I never had that fuzzy sense of _forgetting_. There was only the warmth of blood on my cheek and a heaviness in my thighs. I wanted to collapse onto one of the cots or the chair, but they seemed so far from me that I could do nothing more than stand and hope those insects found their way out from underneath my flesh.

Dima let out a groan and it unstuck my boots from the floor. I walked very numbly to him, perching on his cot. I tugged his blankets around him. He had started to shiver, his eyes struggled to focus. Through the savage, gushing sound that rolled around my brain, ticking from one side to the other and tilting right back again, I understood that Alyosha was speaking.

"It had to happen. We don't know how that disease spreads. It could already be in the cabin for all we know. If there is a cure, then we'll explain that we didn't know about it. We feared for our lives. But they won't question us on it too hard, not with the reports that I saw in that newspaper."

"What will Vasya think?" I croaked.

"It doesn't matter," Alyosha said. "Because we're here and he's not. We'll need to move the body off the porch. He could be spreading disease even – even like that."

Blood seeped beneath the doorframe, black and soupy and opaque, and it looked like a portal to another world. We had dived right into it, and it had left us topsy-turvy, unable to understand this new place, this new land, and which had left us trapped no matter how much we tried to contort ourselves through that same portal. We had grown too large, too inflated, and the portal never budged around us.

**x**

Dragging the body across the clearing had been difficult by myself. I never wanted Dima to be alone, and Alyosha was afraid to even look at the corpse; its body had bumped against the two steps that led to the porch, its skull smacking wetly against the wood and then thumping onto the dirt. Its arms had fallen behind him, stretched like it wanted to paint wings made from soil.

 _He_ , I thought. _Not_ _it._ _He_ _._

I hauled him through the clearing, into the first patch of woods that bordered the cabin and left him by some bushes. I dusted off my hands. I went back inside counted out the last four cans of soup left in the cupboard.

**x**

The cabin turned shadowy and black once the sunlight outside dripped away between the trees, and the candles had run out. There was no more orange light across the treetops. I felt as if we had landed on an island far from all other life, and ships passed us in the night, distant beacons of light that moved away while we remained stationary. Vasya was aboard one of those ships and he bobbed past us, unaware that we stayed here and waited for him. The waves crashed together in clashes of white foam; separated, then clashed together again, separated.

**x**

Numbly, I took my camera from my rucksack and went back out onto the porch. I took a photograph of the woods directly across from us and shook out the Polaroid, searching madly for any dots of colour that might speckle the forest.

It was black, soupy, opaque.

There was only a silver line which contrasted it. It was lumpy and pale and it took me a while to realise that it was outline of the body out there.

I fell back into the chair. I looked for passing ships.

**x**

Alyosha shook me awake, gripping my shoulder tight. It was dark all around him. He looked small, as if he had become a child again, stirring his mother after a nightmare. He said, "Dima feels cold. He isn't moving anymore."

Dima's lips were sticky with that same foam from the ocean and his eyelids had been peeled back, so that he looked at the ceiling of the cabin. His cheeks were bruised, his forehead too. I closed his eyelids. I sat with him. I glimpsed passing beacons that reflected my glassy, blank eyes. Alyosha sat in his chair and never spoke at all. He stirred chunky soup in a bowl and swallowed cold mouthfuls of it. I heard the soup slither down his throat. I imagined it sloshing around his stomach. Never did he speak.

Never did he speak, until he said, "We should put Dima outside. It isn't good to keep him here. We did what we could for him, Sasha."

**x**

In the next photograph, there were two silvery lines intertwined with one another, set against the black sea that rippled and waved behind them. I was not sure why I had taken that Polaroid of those two bodies out there. Had I wanted proof? Had I wanted to know that Dima was dead beside the stranger from the forest?

Had I wanted to know each time that I looked at the Polaroid that _we had done what we could_?

**x**

Sinking into the ditches, we walked awkwardly, shifting from the lumps that marred the grass beneath our boots. Alyosha slunk behind with his shoulders hunched. He carried a rucksack with practical things like our passports and visas, still convinced that we might need them. I carried the last cans of soup and water-bottles, along with some shirts, our maps. I had the rifle, too. I kept the camera even when Alyosha wanted me to leave it behind – _extra weight_ , he said.

But his rucksack was relatively light in comparison, and my shoulders would take the burden.

**x**

Crickets chirped and the frogs croaked, just like they had that afternoon in the woods. I thought about moving toward that gas station like we had planned, but it stuck in my throat – if Vasya had gone on that same route and never returned, it made me wonder what he had come across along the way. But Alyosha would follow if I walked that way. Besides, our first mistake had been to separate. I could put him in more danger if I forced him to follow me to the gas station, but I wanted to find my brother.

"We could take an alternate route," I said. "Loop around from the other side and see if we can't find Vasya that way."

Alyosha only nodded.

**x**

While Alyosha slept, I pencilled a rough sketch of the path that I wanted to take, because I had never even visited Georgia before this trip and the land was new to me. I just wanted my brother, and it pushed me to memorise that map. I let Alyosha sleep a little longer, then tried to stir him before dawn. But I did not really want to sleep. I was afraid to sleep. I saw too many things while I was awake, and it was hard enough to fight them like I did.

"Keep walking," I said. "Or we'll be left behind."

**x**

There was a small church on a lonely road that branched off from the main one, which I had wanted to avoid. Its wide, pine-wood doors were left open. There were corkboard-shrines all around, clotted with posters pinned over one another, names printed in bold. I stared at the photographs there, photographs which showed small children stood on beaches with arms looped around shoulders and dimming sunsets and small lips smeared in ice-cream and jelly.

MISSING – HAVE YOU SEEN…

I shuffled through some Polaroids that I had in my diary and picked a photograph of Vasya that I had taken in the airport before we came to visit Dima. He wore a baseball cap and his smile was wide, made even gentler by the laughter lines that marked either side of his mouth. He looked young. He looked like _me_. I placed the Polaroid beside another photograph of a baby in its carrier. I scratched his full name into the wood, because I had no marker and the pencil was too soft to carve out the Latin letters. _VASILY_.

"Do you think this was happening all while we were up in that cabin?" Alyosha asked. "And we were just sitting there in our own little world, thinking that everything was fine because it looked that way to us. Because the sun still rose and the birds still sang and everything _looked_ like it was supposed to."

We walked another mile and the lining of my boots turned a rusted red from my ankles chafing against them.

**x**

Crouching on my haunches, I watched a beetle crawl around the creases of my rucksack that I had left on the ground. Alyosha leaned against a trunk nearby, his hands over his face. He had wanted a rest, and we took turns to sip water from one bottle passed between us. I dabbed a small dollop of water onto my cloth and scrubbed it around my neck and all the parts that had turned a light red from the heavy sunlight, but felt his eyes prickling my skin even more than the sunburn.

"We should try to spare it," he said.

"Alyosha, don't be a child."

"A child," he snorted, shaking his head.

"We're tired. Frustrated. We don't need to fight with each other."

I glanced at him after a few seconds of silence and saw tears streak his face again. It frustrated me that he fell apart so easily. I took the beetle and placed it on a tree beside me, reaching to scoop my rucksack from the ground. I slung it over one shoulder, balanced the rifle on the other.

"Sasha," he called out. "How much longer would you have waited for Dima to die?"

The rucksack almost slid from my arm, but I caught it quickly and turned back to face him. "What?"

His shoulders lifted, though it was not quite a shrug. "I was sitting in that cabin and it occurred to me that we had four cans of soup left in the cupboard. That night, we would have eaten one, two, three – and the last one would be spared until the next day. Who gets it, then? Well, Dima wasted most of his. I mean, he was barely conscious toward the end there; he couldn't even swallow it when you fed him. And I thought, are we going to stay in this cabin until he dies?"

"I told you," I said coldly, "that I would have walked to that _fucking_ gas station and found some help."

His eyes turned to slits against the blistering sun behind me. "Right. And disappear like Vasya did?"

There was a discomfort in me that slithered around my limbs and constricted me. "He might have run into somebody that could have helped us and he might have gotten delayed. He could be at that cabin for all we know."

"For all we know," Alyosha echoed distantly. "And for all that is still yet to come."

The beetle was still on the tree and its shell glinted as it tested the bark before it turned and spun back to where it had come from. I could not draw my stare away from it, because it had suddenly become very difficult to look at Alyosha.

"What else could we have done? We couldn't carry him. The car wasn't working," I mumbled. "And Vasya never came back. We would have figured it out."

"If we had waited any longer, he would have died anyway."

The wind that blew through the trees was warm and damp. I hardly felt it. I was overwhelmed with a cold, brittle understanding that went deeper than the chill in the air. "If we had waited," I echoed slowly.

Finally, I looked at him, and he dragged his eyes to meet mine at the same time, too, like he had sensed me. I witnessed how bloodshot they had become, how mean and how resentful – _of what and of whom_? I marvelled at the fact that I had not noticed the change until it was right there in front of me, impossible to ignore. His legs were lain out beneath him in such an infantile way, bow-legged, his shoulders drawn and his palms pressed flat against the dirt.

"What was the difference between Dima and the man on the porch? Both were infected. If I had left it another hour, maybe we would be infected now, too."

"What did you do?"

Alyosha swallowed; his shoulders did that odd lift, not quite a shrug but not quite anything else, either.

"He was asleep. He would never have understood what was happening."

I had been split in half like some rotted fruit, my innards scooped out until I was completely hollowed out, and even then, it seemed that some sharpened knife was still scratching for pips left behind. I stumbled on nothing, though it felt as if I had been violently pushed by some unseen hand, and it kept pushing and pushing from all sides and I couldn't right myself without being thrown around again.

"I used a pillow," Alyosha said. "I make it very quick. I don't see how it was any different from what you did to that man on the porch. So, don't look at me like that."

The world was very quiet, then. I looked down at the beetle and watched him scuttle around with his pincers clicking, like he wanted to speak to me in his own tongue. Then, the beetle stilled. His shell glinted in the rays of light that slipped through the other branches and I wondered if I had somehow hurt him when I held him, damaged one of his many legs. But he moved forward in a jolt and was shaken off the branch by wild tremors.

I had not shaken the tree.

Instead, it was a droning hum in the soil that bled through my boots and seeped into my bones that had thrown him from his exploration, dropped him onto the dirt and forced him to shelter beneath sagging leaves. He burrowed into the same soil that quivered so much around him. I felt a familiar tightness take hold of my arms; it happened like that in moments of anxiety for me, as if I found it hard to move myself like I did before – like a porcelain doll cracked into place, arms bent at jutting angles that seemed far too unnatural.

"The helicopters," Alyosha said. I heard him through a vacuum. His words were lost in its swirl, but I craned my neck and stared dumbly at the sky all the same. "The helicopters are coming back!"

I felt prickling droplets of dew slip from the branches and speckle my face when I followed his nodding head toward the clouds, squinting against the sunlight to look for those familiar green underbellies. Alyosha rushed to find a gap between the trees, waving his arms. I decided that I loathed that blooming drone that thrummed around us in a cocoon of sound, so that we could never tell quite where it came from; buzzed like the insects that coated the ground beneath us, but somehow were harder to find even against the blue backdrop of the sky. I remembered stories from my Grandmother about the planes she had seen in the war.

I realised with a dull and blunt pain that those helicopters were not seeking out survivors who had left the city and trawled through the woods; they were looking for those infected, and they would do to them what I had done to that man on the porch, because there had been nothing else to do.

I stepped back toward the tree. I never warned him.

The noise grew louder and settled on my shoulders like a dead-weight. It pushed me into the ground until I became the root of a flower, soon crushed beneath the careless step of boots, old boots, worn and scuffed like mine, like all the flowers we had crushed before we could stand in this place, with that horrid whirl of sound around us.

There came a sharp, needling drop in pitch, a whistle that ran louder and louder with each passing second.

The earth around us imploded in clumps, bursting upward and thundering back down in falling sheets of dirt, sprinkling us and throwing us against the ground. In my left ear, a dense pressure had built and built until I thought that my skull had cracked open; shattered, like a teaspoon tapped against eggshell, torn open by that awful whistle. I fell forward, thrown by the world tilting to one side. I spoke aloud, I heard the words in my throat and tasted them as they left my mouth, but they came out muffled and lopsided, like one half of my mouth had fallen slack and numb.

The whistle was blown harder and harder again, like a bell clapped back and forth in a tower that had been formed in my skull, and it blended into my hoarse, rasping screams – because I had been screaming and I had not even known it until some glob of blood and spit ravaged my throat and scraped the back of it and let me choke. I was slumped against the trunk of a tree, scrunched tight in a ball. I dared lift my head, looking around for Alyosha. I felt a thick line of drool pool from my lips, like they were not mine. I could not control them; just worms, wriggling on that blank space where my mouth had once been, and I tried to push them into shape, but all that came out were screams that sounded alien.

I heard words like we had dived beneath water and each syllable lapped against me but were washed away before I could really catch them. It became a blistering torture in my skull, that pressure in my eardrum that made me struggle to stand and hold myself up – I tilted, tilted and tilted like I did before, turned around and around while the colours around me spun and dripped into one muddy blend of dull brown. I stood and tumbled with my hands pressed onto the ground for balance, then tried to straighten myself out. I walked like an infant, taking a handful of wobbling steps and holding still.

I tried to look through the blanket of black smoke that fell from the treetops and settled on the soil in heavy layers of soot. I felt it rub onto my skin and line my lungs, that smoke. He was a few feet away from me, and I wondered how he had gotten that far when it seemed like we had been side-by-side earlier. I came close to him, dropped to my knees, climbed back up and fell again.

"Alyosha?"

He was limp in the grass and his chest rose and fell in wet gasps, and his eyes went 'round and 'round in fright. His lips blew out in his effort to speak and I held him like I had held Dima, resting his head against my lap and brushing my hand over his forehead to soothe him. He wept, the tears streaking through the dirt that coated his skin. I shifted him closer and saw that he had lost his legs. He was barely with me anymore, his eyes rolling and his mouth still trying to push out those sounds, but they seemed gargled and foreign; they touched the shoreline but were swept away in the riptide that followed in my damaged ear.

There came a beautiful, eternal silence that numbed the low whistle in my ear. His blood darkened the soil, his hands scrunched and loosened, scrunched and loosened. I looked up into the woods and felt much like I had in our old cabin when I stared at the wall, counting ships that passed in slow dips – up and down, up and down. I snaked my arm around his throat and shushed his thrashing. I pressed down, on his throat, harder and harder. He tried to scratch my face and claw my throat. I watched ships; I watched the clouds.

The world had never been so gloriously silent.

Between the swaying branches, a rabbit watched serenely with its wet, coal-coloured eyeballs.

**x**


	3. three: the plan

_three: the plan_

* * *

Sat atop a branch with a blanket rolled out beneath me, I sipped lukewarm tea from a silver-tinted cannister and chewed on stale, crumbling biscuits. The trees shivered from a light mist that dripped from maroon-coloured clouds. I took the binoculars which bumped against my chest and looked out at the gaps between the black, dense thickets around me. I dropped the binoculars and rubbed at my left ear, as if that might knead out the tinny whistle that had slowly grown louder in the last hour.

There had been brief rolls of thunder throughout the afternoon. I wished I had been wise enough to scout some old house, but I often saw silhouettes of Biters smacking against dusty windows or stumbling from half-opened garages and it had left me afraid to sleep in those places should a Biter stumble from some unseen room inside.

I rested against my makeshift bed with a spare, rolled-up coat pressed against its harsh bark for comfort. The coat had been found in a suitcase on the side of the road. It was army green, its left arm decorated with an embroidery rose. It was warm, but pretty useless against rain despite its hood. I had never liked storms, especially not outdoors. There was something that disturbed me about those flashes of bright, intense lightning and the anticipation of thunder that made me anxious.

Perhaps it was because they illuminated the handful of clearings that clumped around the forest, and I expected there to be some silhouette stood out there whenever the lightning struck. It bothered my eardrum, struck up that awful whistle that made me want to sink against the branch with my jacket wrapped around my head to muffle it. It usually happened in random bursts, rattling around my skull.

I shut my eyes and imagined what might have happened to Vasya, like I had imagined almost every night over the last seven months. I had trekked toward that gas station. It had been nothing but shattered windows and aisles in disarray.

There had been nothing of him in that place, not even his rucksack.

What hurt most was knowing that, even if it had been there, it had probably been taken before I could have even found it and known that he made it that far at all.

**x**

I hovered in that beautiful, hazy place that wavered between sleep and consciousness, dozing against the hard bark that carved itself into my spine with its imprint. I felt my chin dip against my chest, the cap around my head slipping forward to cover my eyes like a curtain. I dreamt of summers spent sleeping in trees with my brother.

The fuzzy sunlight that spilled between the branches and the shimmering grass that coated the world beneath us and turned it into an endless sea of green, speckled in wildflowers. I saw an orange shirt in the distance of this dream and squinted to see it better, realising that it was Alyosha stood on the other side of the field. He waved his arms, a map scrunched in his hand. I turned back to Vasya.

He had morphed into Alyosha, but still spoke in his own voice. He asked, "How much longer would you have waited for Dima to die?"

**x**

I awoke on the cusp of dawn and drank cold tea that slithered along my throat in trickles. I pulled out a crinkled map and shook away thoughts of the map in that field, smoothing it out against the bark. There was still that mark that showed where the other cabin had been, and it was not too far from our old place, but I had been afraid to return there. I suspected that the Hunter we had found in the woods, the man who had gotten himself caught in a bear-trap, the man who had been shot on our porch with the same rifle looped around my arm.

He would have left weapons in that cabin and he might have had supplies. The cabin was tucked so far into the woods that I hoped nobody else had stumbled across it and taken anything. But I recalled the truck that had sat beside it. I remembered the newspaper plastered over its grimy windowpanes.

I wondered if anybody had been in there when Vasya had first pointed it out.

Birds fled from the treetops and startled me. They fled a cracking round of gunshots, rushing off toward the bruised splotches of blue-violet that streaked the sky. I lay myself flat on the branch beneath me, settling the rifle against my shoulder and gripping its handle. I squinted through its scope with my right eye, drawing its muzzle toward my left, then back toward my right, scanning the trees for the smallest movement.

It all seemed terribly calm, though the gunshots had come in a sudden round that ended as quickly as it had started. I remained perfectly still and tensed even more at the sight of an orange t-shirt shifting between the black trees a few metres away. I imagined myself still in my old dream with Alyosha and an uncomfortable heat rolled down my spine, making me shift against the branch and adjust the rifle – I wanted, in some small way, to make sure that I was not in that dream.

Through the scope, I watched the trees part and reveal that it was a man in that t-shirt. He was marched toward one of those clearings by five other men. I counted them using their baseball-caps that looked a little like mine, and I watched them lower a man onto his knees. His mouth moved in a muted pantomime for me. Though I could not hear him, I knew that he was not pleading for a damned thing. I saw it in how he held himself. He spat on the ground and smiled like he had never known a better way to die than out there in the woods, with guns pointed at him from all directions.

So, I pointed one more and aimed for his forehead. I thought I would shoot him before they did, either to spare him or just to steal that grim satisfaction from their kill. But I was more impressed by how the man on his knees acted like _he_ was still the one in charge. I dragged my aim toward the man who stood directly behind him and counted out those baseball-caps all over again – five, though I allowed leeway for any strays who might have lurked in the blind-spot directly beneath me. If there was more, I could only hope they stepped forward. I had a grace period, but it would be short.

I counted them the same way that I had counted rabbits in a field with Vasya; it was much easier like that.

Red Baseball-Cap lifted his pale-white lips in a sneer and I caught him before it could drop.

I turned the rifle toward the man immediately to his right. I mowed him down and ran along the line of men that stood alongside him, counting the thumps and pushing away memories of warm coal eyeballs spinning toward me. The gunshots from my own rifle sounded like a bat smacking against a metal sheet, and the recoil was softened against my shoulder. Once I finished, I sniffled and looked through the scope once more, focusing on the man. He had clamped his eyes shut, his head turned left toward his hunched shoulders. He straightened out and looked around himself in amazement.

I would have left him there, if not for the fact that he was still tied up. Gunshots drew the dead from miles around, and I figured it would have been a waste of all my bullets to spare him from one death only to set him up for another.

**x**

Climbing down from the tree required scaling back with a rope. I had done it enough times even back in my home country that I jumped down on the final part with ease, though my ankles rattled from impact. The ground was hard and the leaves cracked beneath my boots. I walked between the trees and mulled over what should be done once I met this new man. I worried that if I cut his ties, he might try and take my rifle and rucksack – or worse. I thought about all the methods that I would use to free myself from a bind like that.

I stepped into the clearing, surprised to find that there were a whole bunch of corpses on the dirt, but he had disappeared. I turned to look for him right when he tackled me and held me down, even with his hands tied behind him. I rolled with him and waited for him to sit on my chest, but he had dropped hard beside me, breathing out in stuttered rasps. He was bruised all over his face, his eyelid turning a fat purple and his eyebrow split.

I sat up with my elbows embedded in the dirt. His black hair fell forward in thick strands and blood dripped from his mouth in a wobbling line. He was hunched forward on his knees, like he was about to slump over in exhaustion, but he remained in his spot. He lifted his gaze and looked at me with the same smile that he had worn in the clearing once a pistol was aimed at him; like its barrel was the punchline of some grand joke that only he had heard.

"Let me guess," he grinned, grinding his cheek against the dirt to look at me. "You're my little saviour, but you're only here to take what little shit I got left. Well, you're flat outta luck, sweetheart, because the bastards you just shot got it all before you did. Tough fucking luck. Hell, the pair of us – we got that in fucking _spades_."

I turned my eyes away from him and tipped my boot against the corpse closest to me. He rolled limply. His blank eyes watched the clouds, his mouth parted to speak. In his forehead, there was a small, beaded dot of black to the left of his temple. It had been a little sloppy, but enough for a rifle that I had never used. I remembered an old habit that my Grandmother had in war.

I bent down to sift around my rucksack and found a pair of keys from the old cabin that I had never thrown away even in the last few weeks when they had seemed to do nothing more than take up space in between the bottled water and thread. I pressed the tip of the key against the muzzle and scratched five lines for good measure.

All the while, that man had his forehead pressed into the ground beneath him. His body shuddered in violent tremors and blood dripped from his mouth still held in a gnarled smirk with his teeth stained and his gums slit. I realised that the tremors were not from pain, but laughter. All the world seemed funny to him, from the pinkish glob of spit that he hawked beside him after he straightened out and the snot that ran from his nostrils once he rested back on his heels.

He watched me through the squint of his good eye, while the other eye dipped uselessly beneath the purpled, swollen eyelid that covered it like blinds on a window. It reminded me of those old dolls I used to push around in strollers, its glass eyeball bopping in nods whenever its body was lifted.

I pushed another corpse onto its side and patted around its pockets. I collected their pistols and took smaller things like their spare bullets and packets of cigarettes. I figured they could be useful for trading, though I had never really crossed another group.

I had not really spoken to anybody either, apart from those bad moments after horrid dreams in which I talked to Dima like he was sat right beside me. I found a pair of walkie-talkies in their belt loops and took them too, though I was not sure if I could fiddle with them enough to change their frequencies.

I wondered if he had been tortured. It seemed surreal to imagine such a thing, but there was one world and another, like two balls on separate chains swung back and forth in tandem, until one chain rusts and begins to rock out of its own rhythm.

The balls had become disconnected, like those worlds had never been one and the same, before.

Sunlight warmed the nape of my neck and tipped my head back to revel in its heat dripping down my spine. I hardly realised that the man had hauled himself onto unsteady feet. He remained hunched, spine curved around the binds on his wrists that chafed and rubbed his flesh _raw_. He wobbled two steps ahead, stumbled back another three. His boots stuck in the dirt and mounds rose like waves in an ocean against the leather, spread outward around the length. He puckered chapped lips and coughed hard, so hard that it almost took him down again. But he steadied himself.

The man rattled out some rapid-fire speech and then kicked some dirt. I paused, balancing over another corpse. "What?" I asked.

His eyes met mine. I saw that they were black, soupy, opaque. "You weren't listening? I said – that group are still out there. So, if we're gonna stick together, we should keep it moving."

"No."

His mouth dropped. "Are you goddamn _kidding_ me right now? Are you fucking _nuts_? I said – All right, fine. I'll do you a solid since you just saved my sorry fucking ass. Those dickhead brain-dead fucks that you just shot right there? They're with a whole lot of other dickhead brain-dead fucks. Those _same_ dickhead brain-dead fucks _used_ to play it safe and stick to one spot, but they ran out of food and they started moving further and further out to find it. So, you think you can take all of them on? Fucking _dandy_. But word of warning, they take women – and they do _not_ keep them. You understand what that means?"

I tightened the drawstrings of my rucksack and fixed its strap. "I understand," I said calmly.

"Good. Well – good."

He turned and started his bow-legged walk across the clearing. His silhouette was smudged and blurred from the sun. He walked so far away that he blended into the trees. I continued to sift through the corpses' pockets, delighted to hear the crinkle of a wrapper. I pulled out a granola bar and unwrapped it. I had just bitten into it when I heard his stomping footsteps return in all their fury. I was still bent down, and I turned my head toward him, amused.

"I was doing you a goddamn fucking favour," he said. "I didn't _have_ to tell you jack- _shit_ , even if you did save my donkey-sized nuts earlier. You're just gonna – what, climb back up that tree where you were hiding before? It _was_ a tree, wasn't it? You're not worried about some goddamn psycho-fuckers with a hell of a lot more guns than you?"

I pushed the mouthful of granola over to the other side of my cheek. "No."

His jaw was locked, eyes narrowed. "Then good fucking luck to you, sweetheart, 'cause you're really gonna fucking need it. They got twenty-five men – well, twenty, thanks to you – and they'll come right at you with all guns blazing. You got that?"

I swallowed the granola and nodded at him. If I really thought about it, I would be out of food soon. I could probably shoot an animal, but I had never skinned one and I doubted that it would be as simple as I hoped. I could look around that cabin marked on my map even if I was wary without a partner, then I could have moved further out of this area to avoid the men that he claimed were around. I could not stay in trees and it was harder to sleep on the ground.

Though I believed what he said about those men purely because it showed in his eyes. And while he marched across the clearing all over again, I wondered if it would really be so bad to follow behind him and stick together for a while. He would also be useful for those moments when that whistle bloomed in my ear and I found myself unable to focus very much on my surroundings because of it. He might be able to search that cabin with me.

He was useful and I figured I could keep him around a little longer if he _stayed_ useful. Then, if he ever stopped being useful, we would part ways - one way or the other. Because I would put him down before he could do it to me. Yet he was looking at me like he was thinking the same thing.

"You might wanna cut me loose here," he said, "because that group will be coming real soon. They have a pair of trackers on their team, they'll be here in no time. And I don't intend to be here when they arrive."

I understood him better when he spoke in low, husky drawl. All the English I had learned came from tapes and audiobooks and much slower, clearer speakers with standard accents.

"Well, if they come for me, I give you to them," I said simply.

He paused and peeled his shadows from those of the woods behind as he turned to face me. "What did you say there, darling?"

"I said, if these men come for me – I give them you." I trailed toward him slowly. "You still have rope on your body."

Dumbly, his eyes dropped to his wrists and he seemed surprised, as if he had forgotten all about them. I wondered if those bumps on his temple were not more serious than I had first thought. He bent over and laughed madly between hacking coughs and bloody drool dangled from his lips stretched into a wide smile. He stood properly and continued to cough out his laughs, smacking a clenched fist against his own chest like he wanted to push out the humour.

_He's already nuts,_ I thought to myself. _He's got no marbles left rolling around in that skull of his._

"And what happens then, in this little fantasy of yours, huh? They thank you and let you on your merry way? No fucking way, doll. They'd shoot me, sure. But you – oh, they'd do a _lot_ worse. I would rather a bullet in my fucking skull than what they would do to _you_."

For all his cursing and that slick wetness in his stare, I believed him. _Again_ , I believed him. He often glanced behind me like he expected the men to barrel out from behind the bushes and shoot him right there and then. Like he had done earlier, he drew his hands over his face and scuffed the dirt with his boot.

"Look," he said tiredly, "I been through some real hell these last few days. I'm thanking you for getting my ass outta one hairy situation by telling you not to stick around this place. I meant it – they'd do a lot worse to you than to me. Hell, they already did all they wanted to do to me. I saw what those men do. I don't want it to happen to you."

I remembered that cabin marked on my map. I remembered that I had only a handful of stale biscuits in my rucksack and one bottle of drinkable water, too. All the other things in there like the pistols, some thread and scissors and a knife became useless if I became too starved and dehydrated to even hold them against some drifter. It was a risk to trust him, because he could betray me –…

_like alyosha_

Like Alyosha, he had clever eyes and a cute smile, though it faltered at its edges and trembled like his hands. I felt that tinny whistle bloom in my eardrum again and wished it had happened at any other moment, because my rifle tilted away from him at the same time that the world tilted. The whistle always stuffed the left side of my skull in thickened wads of insulation and muffled all around, and it made me unbalanced and swollen around my eyeballs.

He noticed. He noticed, because his chin tilted back like he was considering me more closely.

"Can you walk far?" I asked.

He lifted his scabbed eyebrow and its crust broke, trickling a fresh line of blood over his skin. His smile was wide, teasing. "Oh, baby, I could run a fucking marathon right about now."

"I found a cabin. I didn't look inside," I told him. "But we could stay there for a night. I'll keep those ties on you until I feel you can be trusted. We'll work together until we can't anymore."

I glanced down at my granola bar, half of it still left to eat.

So, I held it out to him.

His eyebrows rose in surprise, before his lips lifted into a bright, playful smirk that warmed his face and made him look much younger. The blood had framed his strong eyebrows and fell along his cheek like a teardrop, rounding his smile and dripping from his chin. He took the bar that I offered him and snapped a chunk off with his teeth.

Then, he bent and grabbed a baseball-cap that had been blown off one of the corpses in its fall. The material was coated in a slick layer of blood and shook it off. He plopped it on his head with his hands cupped together by the ties and smiled at me again.

"What? Can't be wasteful in this world, or it'll waste you."

**x**

Somewhere along a winding road that led to the cabin, before the sunlight melted and the clouds turned purple, he said, "I don't think I told you yet. I'm Negan."

He waited a beat and added, "Fine. I'll call you Scout, then, since you were up in that tree scoutin' like a goddamn -..."

I walked ahead of him, already wishing that I could stuff my ears. He scoffed behind me and took three strides to catch up.

"Not much of a talker, huh? Okay. I respect that."

"No," I replied. "You just talk too _much_."

He feigned offense, his mouth falling open. He prepared some wild speech in his head but he changed tactics before he could get it out. "Fine. I won't talk until we reach our destination. See how you like it."

**x**

We made it about twenty-five steps before he started talking again about how much he missed some leather jacket those men had stolen from him.

**x**

Out of habit, I looked for birds and tried to find their names in English like I had done with Alyosha. It passed the time. It made the tinny whistle in my ear dim and made thoughts of what had happened to Vasya fade along with it.

**x**

The sunlight had melted in a cold cluster of lavender clouds that saturated the sky overhead. There was the cabin sat in the blackened folds of the shadows. Without light, without noise. It was so eerily still and unchanged that I closed my eyes and imagined that it was Vasya stood alongside me, not Negan, and we were both still ignorant of all that had happened in the world while we played checkers and ate cold sandwiches.

But I heard those sharp, darting breaths that came from Negan and my eyes flickered open. He leaned against a tree and dipped his head back against the bark to rest. He was winded. Those men had knocked him around and he tried not to show that he felt it in his ribs. As soon as he noticed I was watching him, he pushed off the tree and came closer.

"Do you think that old girl even runs?" he asked, nodding at the truck. "Fuck. Thing looks old as _shit_."

"You don't look any better."

Negan raised an eyebrow. "Well, shit. Was that a sense of humour? I _specifically_ ticked the box that said my Russian mail-order bride would be humourless, thank you. _I'm_ the funny one here."

I bumped harshly against his arm. "Do you ever stop talking?"

"Where the fuck did I put that goddamn receipt for my mail-order bride, huh? You know, it just struck me that I also asked she not be so goddamn _rude_. I got feelings in here, you know. I'm not all good lucks and fucking charm."

"Yes, I noticed," I muttered.

He pretended to look hurt. "Oh, you are going right back in that box they shipped you in for that one."

"Look at the cabin, Negan. Do we knock on the door? Shoot its windows?"

"Shoot its fucking windows? What kind of damn spaghetti Western film are _you_ in? We – Well, we – ah, fuck. I guess we knock on the door like we're comin' 'round for dinner and beer with the neighbours."

"I'll check it," I said.

He smiled. "If you cut these ties, I could help you. We'd be a dream team."

I looked him up and down. "No. I will check."

"Suit yourself, sweet pea. Just holler if you need a hand – or two," he grinned, lifting his bound wrists to wiggle his fingers at me. "Just hurry up. Not that I'm not into kinky shit, but bondage never got me very hot, you know?"

The colour on the door was chipped, but it had once been painted blue. I rapped my knuckles against it and listened close. The slow shuffle of shoes and cold, rattling groans signalled that there was a corpse in there. I had my right ear against the door. The whistle in my left had quietened during our walk but had not left me entirely. I pressed closer and wondered if it was my bad ear that had tricked me. My eyebrows furrowed and I shifted my weight to listen, but it clicked with me when the floorboards creaked.

It was not the lolloping hop of the corpses. The groans had ceased. There was a sharp click.

Gunshots rang out as I ducked sideways, flinching against a downpour of glittering wooden splinters that fell across my shoulders and tangled in my hair. In my head, I screamed at myself to grab my rifle, though my hands felt wet and slick and slid from the metal once I finally managed to take hold of it. The gunshots finished, but the tension that strung my limbs tight against my body reverberated even more.

The door, already flimsy and rotted, practically fell from its hinges against the last peppering round of gunfire.

I glimpsed a silhouette in the hall of the cabin right as I turned to shoot, but I leapt back for cover once their gunshots cracked against the wall and sprayed around the doorframe. They had bad aim and shot madly at me, which left me unable to do more than wait for them to run out of bullets. I huffed and banged my head against the wall behind me, unsure of what I was supposed to do. I sought out Negan across the clearing, looking for him between the bushes, looking and looking.

But Negan was not in the bushes anymore.

I cursed him, smearing my hand over my sweating forehead while I tried to look for the slightest hint of him anywhere around me. He had seeped into those black shadows, perhaps to find a pointed rock that might break his ties. I hoped he tripped on that same rock and split his skull open instead.

I recalled that calmness that had overcome me in the kitchen of our old cabin, when I dreamt of passing ships that bobbed far away from my island; the waves smacked against one another, the sand shifted from the foam that lapped against it. I pushed the rifle onto my shoulder and slowly dropped my rucksack onto the porch, patting around for a pistol. I checked that it was loaded, drew in another breath, and darted to the left.

I aimed for the silhouette in the middle of the hall and saw that it had grown lumpy – the lumps moved around beneath its skin and I realised that it was two silhouettes struggling with one another. I shuffled forward into the cabin with my gun still raised, and in the dim light that draped itself around the shadowed figures, I realised that one of them was Negan with his ties around the throat of the other man, acting as a garrotte.

The man was covered in blood already wore a string of intestines around his neck like a scarf. In the struggle, the intestines slithered off and slapped wetly onto the floor. He gripped at his throat and tried weakly to shake Negan off, but his knees collapsed from under him, and he soon fell against the ground. He twitched twice, then became stiff. Negan had almost decapitated him.

His ties had snapped against the strain.

Negan rubbed his wrists, watching me with a bright smile. For a nanosecond, I wondered if he might kill me. I still had the pistol. But he had that look about him like the pistol posed as much threat to him as an ant –…

_we must look like little ants to them. little specks of dirt atop more dirt_

Negan coughed. It was a sudden, hacking sound. He thumped his chest and then he tipped forward onto his knees before he fell flat on his front, just beside the man he had killed. I saw that fresh blood stained his lips and his eyes rolled. I lowered the pistol, so stunned that only his pained groan jolted me into action. I rushed to him and flinched at the pale, twisted hands that stretched from a door on my left. There was a dead man chained to the railings of a bed, and its feet pirouetted around the floorboards as it tried to free itself. But it seemed that the bed was too heavy and it rocked back against its chains. I slithered my arms under Negan and tried to haul him to a couch. His boots scraped against wood.

He was heavy and it took all my strength to pull him with me. Finally he flopped against the couch and I yanked his legs up, scrubbing at the sweat clotting my brow.

He touched my hand. "Scout? I feel fucking ter-ri- _ble_."

"Sasha," I told him. "My name is Sasha, asshole. You should sleep."

"Sasha - Asshole? Interesting surname," he mumbled. " _Asshole_."

There was a window to the right of the couch that poured a slivery gloss over him. I found it hard to look at him. It was the dampness around his temples and his lips held in a grimace that made me think about Dima and his pain. There had been animals in this world put down for broken legs and infections and diseases that were not curable, but there had been nothing to put down Dima –…

_how much longer would you have waited for dima to die?_

I swallowed, rubbed my brow and remembered that I had just done it. My hand lowered.

I thought, _if I wanted to, I could leave him here right now._

The cabin was strange. Its walls were smeared in thick, black smears that I realised came from the blood of other dead - truly dead, no longer moving corpses - clumped together in the kitchen. There had been a struggle of some kind, long before we had gotten here. All its doors inside the cabin had been propped open with splinters of wood or rocks, except for one that I could see closed at the end of the hall.

I kicked aside the ruined furniture and peeled off some of the newspaper from the windows to let in some light. Stale rays of dust shimmered against the sudden invasion of sunlight. I found two flares in a box, some more string, and another knife. I worried that I had picked a dud of a cabin.

While Negan slept, I found a bucket in the bathroom, half-filled with water. I soaked a cloth and folded it before I placed it his forehead. The man that Negan had killed suddenly groaned and I saw that he had turned to a corpse. The body was strewn in the hall and it lifted its head to groan. I saw its throat through the slit, a reddened gash that peeled apart. It crawled toward me, pouring its blood across every rug in its way. I watched it crawl, my hand still gently pressed over that cloth. Droplets fled its polyester and ran along my wrists.

Eventually, its hands gripped my ankle. I was pulled into movement, _forced_ into movement. I gripped its scalp and yanked it up to wedge my knife into its skull, but I had never anticipated that its head would completely detach from the body. Blood soaked me. I almost dropped the head until I realised its mouth was still moulding itself into ravished moans.

I took the knife and embedded it into its skull. Hot spurting blood soaked me, like a thick splash. I felt it across my face, down my chest, all across my arms. I opened the back door of the cabin and tossed the head outside.

_You stopped saying the man_, I thought. _You said the corpse. You said it. Would you do the same if this had been Dima?_

There was a thump and a fall in the room down the hall, the one whose door was closed. With that knife still gripped in my hand, I walked toward it, my hands starting that awful trembling again. I pushed it open quickly, stepping into the bedroom to find another corpse who still moved and groaned. Its jaw swung and its teeth gnashed, its gooey fingertips drawing strings of blood against the bed as it rose from the ground where it had fallen. It stood there, rasping like Negan had earlier, but not at all attempting to snatch my arms and haul my throat into its gnashing teeth. It seemed blind, its pearl eyeballs seemingly looking behind me. _Beyond_ me.

_She - not it_ , I kept telling myself.

I mulled over what must have happened here. Had she turned? Had he wanted to stay with her? Or had she simply been here when he took the cabin and he had not yet gotten around to killing her? But I noticed a slit in her stomach, dark black in colour. Her clothing creased in that slit, bunched up.

Then it became a little clearer.

He had smeared his skin in her blood and he had draped organs around himself. He had left her in this room where she blindly bumped into furniture but still, somehow, seemed not to notice me. I looked down at myself with dim surprise, because I was covered in the blood of that other corpse I had decapitated. Did she not know I was there because I smelled too much like another corpse? Was that why he had scrubbed himself in blood?

He had figured that out. How, I could never know. But he had figured it out and now I understood, too.

I lodged my knife through one of her white, rolling eyes and she slumped down to the ground, seeing no more.

I glanced around the room and noticed something covered in a strange fold of tarp. I pulled at it and saw a crib underneath. I stared at that crib like its purpose had become unknown to me. I took one step and stumbled on the next. There was a threadbare blanket thrown over a small shape.

The wrinkles in the blanket shifted like earthworms in soil. The soft rasps were like those that the mother had made in the bedroom. The blanket caught on scrunched fists of mottled blue.

I fell back into the hall and slammed the door shut.

From where he lay on the sofa, Negan called out, "Sasha?"

I slumped against the wall behind me and stared at that bedroom door. I scrunched my eyes shut tightly and sunk my nails into the flesh of my palms. I felt those sobs froth up into my throat again, felt my eyes sizzle against that horrid heat. I slammed my hand against my bad ear and tried to make it whistle so that Negan could be drowned out, because he still spoke in his low drawl and his words drizzled off the sofa and pooled across the floorboards toward me; black, soupy, opaque.

_he's already dead_

Negan fell off the couch and the thump of his body against the floorboards made me scream and force my fingers into my hair again, tugging madly at the scalp until it really hurt and strands pulled away with my hands – lowered, lowered down onto my lap – and I suddenly wanted to find my passport and all the documents that we had brought in neat folders, because it was important to keep them close in case the authorities needed to check them –

"Fuck," Negan whispered. He slid along the wall across from me. I wrenched my dried-out eyes away from my hands and looked at him. He shivered and trembled. The bedroom door was open behind him, and I understood that he had seen what I had seen. His stare met mine and the cabin hummed around us as he spoke. "We can't leave it like that."

I was transfixed by the length of the hall, which seemed much longer than it had been before he spoke.

"I can do it," I told him. I tried to stand, but his arm shot out and his hand hovered over my wrist, like he was afraid to touch me and make it real.

"I'll do it," he said. "I can't leave it like that. _Fuck_. You don't have to watch –…"

_you don't have to watch. you just need to open that door_

Negan stood and went into the bedroom. He closed the door behind him. I heard his boots against the floorboards. I heard the shift of fabric and his soft, gentle murmurs. He came back out moments later and turned right rather than left. He went outside, though it was dark and cold and frightening out there. He preferred it.

It was probably not as dark and cold and frightening as it had become in here.

**x**

Moments later, I found the strength to lift myself and wandered to the couch and slept in his sickness, curled in the grooves that his body had made. He walked around outside the cabin and his footsteps crushing leaves lulled me into a dense sleep. I slept for many hours, because I had not slept in the trees and I had not slept since Dima died. I was shaken awake by a foreign hand against my shoulder and I flinched, hearing those words that always came on the cusp of waking up again -

_dima feels cold_

**x**

Negan sat on the small coffee-table in front of the couch where I had fallen asleep. He looked haggard but had cleaned himself. His skin was pink and raw like he had scrubbed and bleached himself ten times over, but all we had was a cloth and a bucket of cold water. He had smoothed his black hair against his scalp and changed shirts.

"I think we should keep moving," he said softly. "I don't want to be in this place anymore."

"Okay." I hesitated, then added, "Thank you."

He stood from the coffee-table and patted my shoulder. His hand lingered there. He said, "Don't ever fucking thank me for what I had to do in that bedroom, because it wasn't anything fucking _good_. Now, take one of those cloths and wash that blood off. Then, go check that that truck out there runs."

_he isn't moving anymore_

**x**

Sitting in the truck, I tried the keys and found that one fit. It had a keyring shaped like Georgia, and a smaller keychain with a little girl photographed in front of a Christmas Tree. I had memorised her face so much that I felt like I had known her in another life. But there were no toys in that cabin, nothing that showed a child had ever been there. It was blood and dead bodies and Negan. He had started to stack all that he found on the coffee-table in the front room while I fiddled with the truck. It was cranky, rusted – its engine sputtered and faltered the first three times that I turned the key.

The engine worked on the third turn.

In the middle of turning it, a corpse smacked against my window. I let my head fall back, blowing my lips in a raspberry. I rolled down the window and put a knife into its skull. It shuddered against the glass and smeared a long, thick trail of blood onto its surface. I drove it forward. Its wheel crushed the arm of the corpse and I heard the slick snapping of bone.

I climbed out, letting the truck run. I expected Negan to be ready and called for him, but he was quiet. I stepped onto the porch of the cabin and glanced in at him. He had our rucksacks piled together, and he had been filling them like he said he would.

But he held a book in his hands and I narrowed my eyes at it, recognising the floral pattern, the golden trimmings – it was my diary. And though I knew that he could not read the paragraphs of Russian, he could look at the Polaroids that had slopped onto the floor.

I stormed in, quickly picking them up and throwing them into my rucksack. I felt embarrassed, though I was not sure what really bothered me about him seeing photographs of Vasya at the river, Dima hours before he had slipped, and Alyosha holding his books. Negan did not react like I had expected. He turned to me with great serenity and it infuriated me all the more. I wrenched the diary from his hands and threw that into my bag, too.

"It fell out," he said. "I never _intentionally_ took out the pictures. They fell."

The pressed, wilted flowers that Dima had gotten me had fallen onto that ground too; intentionally or unintentionally, I left them there.

**x**

His left eyelid had become far less swollen, and he was left with mild bruising. He blinked in that slow way that lizards do, like his eyelid was stuck together with glue and he was forced to pop them open every time. He sat in the truck beside me and watched the world with one eyelid half-shut.

It was about three miles out that he turned and said, "I'm not sorry, you know."

**x**

Sleeping in the truck on the roadside was difficult. The cold seeped from its dusty windows and rolled through the frames of the old, rusted doors. Negan had taken blankets from the cabin and piled two over me, while he took two for himself. I tucked by legs beneath me and used my jacket as a pillow, repeatedly pushing it around for the smallest bit more padding. Negan had even more trouble for all the bruising on his ribs. He moved around, settled, then moved again. In the moonlight, he looked awful.

"I'm not sorry, but I wish your friends had made it," he said. "The ones in the photographs. I wish they had made it like you did."

I closed my eyes and hoped my eyelashes might catch that traitorous droplet before it fled along my cheek. My eyelids fell shut, but the droplets slipped out anyway, and I tried so hard not to sniffle, because that felt too embarrassing in front of him. I heard him shift, heard him settle, heard his blankets ruffle. I almost flinched at the touch of his hands, but he shushed me and placed one of his own blankets around me.

**x**

I slung my rifle onto my shoulder and climbed out of the truck sometime in the night. I stepped down into the ditch to relieve myself, careful to look around myself in case Negan suddenly awoke and looked for me. I walked further and shuffled behind a tree, unbuckling my belt. I had taken the rifle and left him with a knife, should any corpses shuffle out from the coal-coloured smudge of trees. I finished and stood, catching my belt and buckling it once more.

"Sasha - run -... "

Negan had a rough hoarseness to his voice and it sounded even worse, like his throat was constricted. I stiffened despite his order, so stunned and so terrified that my brain took in his words like a shredding machine, swallowing the message whole before tearing it into neat lines that made it incomprehensible.

I heard the sudden slap of chunky boots against asphalt and it clicked – all those lines fell together again, taped so that I could read the words, and my own boots pushed me forward into the woods.

Before all coherent thoughts in my mind turned to mush, one clear understanding came through: Negan had warned me when he could have let me get ambushed.

I ran. The rifle bounced against me. I fiddled with its strap that had twisted on my shoulder. In childhood, I had been chased around fields by friends and we had laughed when caught, but there was a heaviness in the boots that fell behind me that set alight every inch of me and made me dart faster than I thought even possible. I had been much more agile and fit as a little kid. I felt a cloud stuff itself into my chest and it compressed my lungs, made it hard to haul in enough breath, and my own boots had become ill-fitting, my socks dampened from sweat. If I survived this, I would need to get fitter.

I took a sharp turn and heard the man behind me slip in mud. His body made a harsh crack against the ground, but he was already trying to right himself.

There was a corpse ahead of me, its legs broken and splintered at the thigh. I looked left and saw there was a cluster of more corpses bumping between the trees, drawn by something I had not seen – it looked like there had been some kind of animal that had scurried up a tree, because the corpses clawed at the bark, unaware of me behind them. It reminded me of that corpse in the bedroom, blind to me because of the blood that had covered my skin.

Tentatively, I skirted to the corpse trapped by its own broken bones and tried to kill it with my boot, as softly and quietly as possible, though bone almost always made a harsh crack. So, I touched it first. I took the blood that oozed from its broken legs and smeared it onto my cheeks, my own collarbone, my arms.

The corpse clacked its teeth together and pawed at the ground.

I soaked my shirt in what blood was left and then made the decision to crack its skull. I knew that there were only seconds left until that man burst from the bushes behind me. I scooped the mushy chunks of brain that floated in the cup of the skull, pouring them onto my shirt and standing quickly. The corpses were slow. They heard the sound but seemed to think it had come from the same tree that they stood by, but I let out a low, low whistle and let my arms dangle limply in front of me, approaching them slowly.

Distracted, the corpses turned. I counted seven of them, their feet trudging through the mud to walk.

I lolloped ahead of them, afraid that I had made a mistake and soon their bony hands would latch onto my shirt and pull me down onto the dirt. I was terrified and it only then occurred to me how badly I feared death, how much I wanted the hum in my eardrum to grow loud enough to drown out their moans and make it softer for me, make it so I heard nothing but my own stuttered breath and saw nothing but the dim path ahead of me.

Yet the brushes rustled and the man who had been right behind me stepped through. His fall had really hurt him, because his knee was bent inward like he struggled to straighten it out and he had to kick his injured leg with his foot pointed outward to move it.

I was so drenched in blood that he missed me, at first. He saw the corpses and assumed that I was one, too. Then, the corpses all wobbled to follow him and I stood right where I had been, unmoving. His mouth twisted in rage, his eyes black and furious and spotted in confusion around the pupils because the corpses never even noticed me.

Perhaps he understood, looking at all that blood. Perhaps he didn't.

His knife was planted into the skull of the corpse closest to him. It had caught his shirt and its hand had twisted it in its fall, but the man had managed to shake off the corpse. He limped backward, hobbling on his wounded leg and still holding up his knife to take on the next two corpses that approached from either side.

I slipped into the trees and carefully snuck around the corpses with the intention of returning to the truck to find Negan, if he was still alive. But there was a dark stirring in my stomach, a blackened coil ground tighter and tighter as I looked behind myself and saw that the man had his back turned to me and fought against the corpses.

I tasted black on my tongue. I tasted copper, too.

I slunk across the mud and stood directly behind him. I raised my boot and kicked at his bad knee. The corpses dropped and their greyish hands burrowed into him, moved beneath his skin and yanked out thick ropes of intestine with their mouths stretched for feeding. Their gaunt cheeks chewed through flesh.

Their skeletal frames bent over him in garish poses. His stomach was torn apart, his organs littered the ground, and still they scraped at him like the bottom of a tin, scraping and scraping until his ribcage poked through in white spikes. I felt a sick thrill ripple through me that I had outsmarted him. I _liked_ it.

His eyes had found me before the corpses killed him. I made sure to smile.

**x**

Whistling lowly, I crept ahead of the corpses but tried to lead them back to the roadside. I was afraid to find Negan there on the asphalt, pale and groaning and looking just like the lurching gang of corpses that tried to find the sound behind me. Finally, I spotted the outline of the truck and rushed forward a little to put some space between myself and the corpses. I dropped against the upward slope of the ditch and peered onto the road, scanning the darkness for Negan.

Through the gap between the truck and asphalt, I saw him on his knees, surrounded by two other men. The trackers had found us like he said they would.

The corpses tripped into the ditch and tackled the slope. I stiffened against the dirt with the rifle beneath me, afraid that the blood had dried too much and that my own scent would bleed through, but their blue ankles passed my sight and teetered onto the road. Neither Negan nor the trackers noticed the corpses right away. I watched their shuffling steps through that same gap while they lumbered around, bumping into the truck.

I stood as the last corpse floundered out of the ditch and quickly snatched it by its scalp, twisting its jaw away and dragging it around the truck toward Negan. The trackers had opened fire, and Negan had tried to stand in an effort to avoid the other corpses that separated from the pack to attack him instead. He spun around and faced the corpse in my grip. His face was ashen and his eyes were wide.

I threw the corpse down and stomped on its skull, but it took far more to crack his skull open. I cupped the pulp of its brains into my hands like before and threw it at Negan, smearing it around his jaw; lumps slid down his shirt, stuck in his hair, clumped around his ears. I painted him in the blood, taking his hand and rushing him around the truck to cover him.

The corpses had taken down the trackers, though I had not witnessed it like the other man. I waited for the corpses to finish stringing out the guts of the trackers, their teeth tearing at the rubbery texture of hearts and livers. Then, I whistled like I had before. The Biters twisted their gaunt faces to look at the woods and stood on stick-like legs to wander off into the trees. It took some time. Some wandered, some stayed. But the whistling eventually brought them into the woods and they bumbled together through the mud.

The trackers awoke not long afterward and followed them into the inky pool of swaying trees.

**x**

Rainfall came in slow, misty clouds that shimmered downward from grey clouds and washed our skin of rust-coloured blood. I stared at him and found that some of the blood that was swept away had come from fresh wounds on him. His eyelid had sealed shut again. His lip had been cut open. His throat was quickly flushing a strange, blotchy red. When he smiled, the blood trickled down like it had the first day that I had met him.

"Hot fucking damn," he said quietly. "Hot fucking _damn_ , we're still here."

Laughter fizzed in my chest and popped from my mouth like a cork split from a shaken bottle of rich, expensive champagne. I sat against the truck with him, but I bent double from the hilarity of it all. Negan joined in, though his laughter was more of a chuckle, knees drawn to his chest and hands dangling limply between them.

I turned to him, cheeks splitting from a bright smile. I watched the lines around his own grin fade, his mouth twitching around the pain of something that he had just remembered. I saw the welts on his throat and reached to touch him without thinking. I witnessed the tremble of my own hands, like they were not mine, though I told them not to shake like that, not now.

_Some other day_ , I told my shaking hands. _Not now_.

I stroked the harsh welt that marred his throat and he leaned his chin back to let me. I followed his eyes and saw a rope thrown out on the road. It looked like a snake that had been crushed beneath the wheel of a speeding car, its leather held in a corkscrew. I let my hand fall into my lap. It had become too heavy to hold up. All of me had become too heavy to hold up.

"They wanted to kill me right away," he croaked, "but they wanted me to watch what they were gonna do to you first."

"Did they tell you that before or after they put that belt around your throat?"

"After. But I figured if that was how I was gonna go, I could at least have returned the favour that I owed you for what you did. In that clearing before, I mean." His eyes met mine and flashed with humour. "You know, for half of that granola bar you gave me. It tasted pretty fucking good, I'll say that much."

His lips reflected the smile on mine. He bumped his shoulder against mine, then winced and let out a stream of curses.

Hauling him into the truck, I pushed him toward the passenger side and snorted at his whiny complaints that he could still drive, though his good eyelid had drooped tiredly. I told him to sleep it off and he could take a turn in a couple of hours. He snored like a bear, though. I was not sure of the route that we would take from here. The numbness in my legs had softened and I felt more like myself with every mile. But I wondered if there would not be another few men sent for us.

_Twenty-five men_ , Negan had said. _Twenty, thanks to you_.

Now, it had dwindled to seventeen. It felt like pebbles dislodging in a gentle stream that I had once seen, each idea. I imagined rabbits in a field with their baseball-caps blown right off their heads. I mulled over all that he had ever told me about this group and remembered that he had mentioned only two trackers, which meant that the others were inexperienced – maybe they could find us like the others had, but I figured it would take them more time.

For all we knew, they would simply _stop_. It would be a waste of resources, it would ruin their supplies. But they had made it this far to find Negan, and I felt that a few more miles on top of it would hardly turn them off the hunt.

_They wanted me to watch what they were gonna do to you first._

If those men wanted to slaughter us – well, why not turn right around and slaughter _them_?

I caught sight of myself in the mirror.

_how much longer will you wait around for negan to die? for you to die?_

I looked away from myself and out at the road, winding black and unforgiving ahead of us.

**x**

Rolling onto a patch of gravel on the roadside, I shook him awake, and the truck rocked with the force, because he smacked my hand away and I only pushed him harder. He stirred and smacked a hand over his face, dragging it down tiredly. I smiled apologetically at him and he narrowed his good eye in a glare, while the other remained crusted and purple.

There was something terribly funny in teasing him, even if we were not properly friends yet. It was his expression that amused me. He would pinch his eyebrows together and scowl like those English dogs with the drooping faces, pursing his lips in a pout like a scolded child. It took a lot to keep my face blank of any expression whenever he looked at me like that.

"Fuck, Sasha. I always thought a truck rocking back and forth meant there was some kinda hot, devious sex going on in there," he grumbled. He found my rucksack and opened a can of beans. "And if you had told me it'd be me in that truck with a hot Russian chick, I woulda shot my –…"

"Stop talking." Puffs of white left my lips. "I think we should kill the men."

He held the can in one hand, a spoon in the other. "Huh?"

"The men. I think we should kill the men that hurt you. That want to hurt us."

Beans slopped from his spoon and slithered back into the can with a wet plop. "Okay, listen – I like you and all, especially considering we met only a few hours ago. But that is goddamn _stupid_."

"Not if we make a plan."

"Make a plan? Oh, like how we wanna be _buried_? 'Hey guys, could you bury me in a proper grave? Or how about you just toss my body into a ditch seeing as how I'm not gonna be using it anymore? Gee, thanks, fellas'. Come on, Sasha. They'll see us from a mile away."

"So, they have people who watch?"

"Lookouts? Yeah. A few."

"On the floor? The ground, I mean? Or they are high?"

"I bet they wish they were," he muttered. He saw that I was serious and huffed. "Okay, yeah. On the ground, mostly. I still think you're overestimating yourself. I mean, sure, if you're asking if I have seen ' _Kill Bill'_ and imagined myself in that fight against Lucy Liu at that restaurant? Yeah, you bet your ass I have. Have I also imagined myself _with_ Lucy Liu? Abso-fucking- _lutely_."

"Don't you want your jacket back?"

"Oh, so you _were_ listening? Yeah, I want the fucking jacket. But do I want to keep my ass in one piece as well? _Yeah_." Negan finished with his tin and placed it on the seat between us. "Are you serious about this, Sasha?"

It flooded from me like some delayed form of shock. "Seventeen is not that many, not if we think carefully. We have advantages that they don't. We would have more supplies. We would have a nice place to stay. Don't you see what I see?"

Negan watched me closely. His lips curled at the corners, pulled into a familiar grin. "Oh, I'm starting to see a whole lot more than I bargained for. Answer me one more thing, though," he murmured huskily. "Did you feel a fucking thing when you shot those guys that day they tried to kill me in that clearing?"

I held his stare. I could have lied. I could have told him that it broke me up inside. But I told him the truth and said, "No, not really."

"And earlier? The trackers and that other guy?"

I hesitated, and then repeated, "Not really."

"Not really, or not at all?"

"Does it matter?"

"Not really," he said. "But I think if we wanna do this – _really_ wanna do this – then we need a _good_ fucking plan. These guys got a nice set-up. They won't wanna give it up."

There was a strange relief in knowing that it hardly even phased him that I felt very little for having killed those men. He responded as if I had told him that I preferred winter to summer, rain to sun. It seemed, just like it had in the clearing, that he was thinking similarly.

"It doesn't matter to us what they _want_." I looked into his eyes, making sure that he understood me. "Only what they get. They hurt people – they would have hurt us. They would have done more to me than –…"

"All right," he cut off. He seemed agitated, his hands running over his jeans. He really did not like talking about what could have happened if those men had gotten both of us and so he barreled forward, talking faster than usual, so fast that I struggled to keep up with him. "Fine. You're right. We could drive down this fucking road and run into another group just like them. But if we take their shit, and we move into their place, we gotta make a promise to each other that we make it a place for people like us – _survivors_ – to live without worrying that some sick fuck is gonna try and assault them, you got that? We gotta make it – make it _good_. Only take in the people we agree on, only kill those that gotta be killed. And we work with each other."

I stuck my hand out and smiled at him. He glanced down at it and took it, shaking three times before he released me and let out another laugh.

"I think we don't need to use rifle and pistol first." I mimicked his pose, leaning back. "We just need to watch them for a while. Plan together. Figure out strategies, procedures."

Negan whistled. "Strategies and procedures. Damn, if you don't know how to get me all hot under the collar."

**x**

In the morning, I took out the Polaroid camera that had originally belonged to Alyosha. It was small, compact and white. Alyosha had drawn a small bee on the side with a Sharpie and he never did explain the reason for it. It had smudged, anyway, its wings made from a circular splotch. Negan held a damp cloth against his left eyelid and looked to his right at me, noticing the Polaroid camera aimed at him. He had the smallest hint of a smirk on his lips.

After the flash had filled the truck, I waited for the photograph to develop. The light had brightened his skin, turned the purple shades of his bruises an even deeper shade and made his eyes seem blacker. I tucked it away with the others, into my diary, where only one wilted flower remained.

"You shouldn't have looked," I told him. "They are my photographs. I didn't want you to see."

He rolled those black eyes toward me and smiled. "Ain't about what you want," he said. "It's about what you get and what you do with it. Ain't that right, partner?"

I pulled out onto the road and he looked out at the fields and I thought to myself, _I'm glad I didn't let him die. I think he'll stay useful for a little while longer. And when that stops -..._

**x**


	4. four: the change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! i am sorry that it took me so long to get this up, i've been pretty busy with college stuff. weeks ago i had a lot of time to write but not so much anymore lol but i hope you are all doing well and staying as safe as can be. enjoy a chapter of negan quoting pop culture and being vaguely threatening between those quotes, more like the negan we know in the future of the show...heheh...

_four: the change_

* * *

Negan spread the map across the damp, rotted table of an old house and traced its narrow lines until his pencil circled a blackened dot atop a smudge of green and brown near the bottom. His pencil snapped, and still he dragged its splintered end around and around. He drew the pencil in toward his chest, forming a line that dwindled the further down it went. He finished it with a crack of his pencil skidding from the paper, falling from his hand and bouncing against the cold tiles of the kitchen.

"They live in a hotel," he said. "But one half is completely barricaded. Some Biters got stuck down there."

He took another pencil out and sketched a couple of wonky rectangles attached to one another; in those blank white spots, he wrote what each rectangle represented – entrance, hallway, ballroom. I tracked the rapid scratches of his pencil against the paper while I snacked on peanuts, shaken onto my palm and then tipped into my mouth. I kicked my boots from the table and leaned closer to study that splotch of angry faces he had doodled in the top left corner of his blueprint.

"You said it had been evacuated," I murmured. "Then where did the dead come from?"

Negan pursed his lips and shrugged. "Beats me. They were already down there when I arrived. But I wasn't even worried, because those Biters stuck in the basement and the door that blocks them is steel. Wilkes had some padlocks and extra bolts added. From the side that we lived in, you couldn't even hear them – and you forgot about them. Just carried on like you always did."

"What is this little section?"

His eyes fell onto the smaller square that I tapped at. "Closet. Beside it, a freezer. It ran on a generator for a while, which meant they still had some meat, but that all finished within a few days. The meat rotted and the men got a little rowdy, but Wilkes soon beat 'em right back into line. Only thing I could ever say was good about the guy: he knew how to keep men in line. Shit, he bashed in so many skulls. But nobody ever talked back to him. Hard to do it with a broken jaw, I guess."

I crumbled the packet of peanuts in my hand and dropped it onto the table; its creases unfurled, it reopened like a flower. The house was inky in its darkness, its shadows swallowed the floorboards and licked the wallpaper with its black forked-tongue. There was something heavy about it that had not been there until we closed the door behind us. There was a sullenness in the furniture. I decided that I preferred the houses that had been damaged, because these houses tucked behind fences disturbed me more for all their untouched stillness.

"Mark the exits," I said. "Mark where the Biters stay. Mark the freezer, too."

▬

"If Wilkes were to die," I asked later, "who would take over?"

Negan cracked a smile. "Oh, I would guess from those still stuck in that hell-hole that it'd be a fella named Bradley. Little soft in the head. Thought he was one slick son of a bitch, though, 'cause Wilkes let him throw his weight around. Why?"

"We kill Wilkes. And then Bradley."

"It won't bring some kind of downfall if that's what you're thinking. They got food, got beds. Wilkes had everything assigned to their own share, he was like a goddamn General with that shit. They won't stop looking out for each other just 'cause you put some pressure on 'em."

I looked at the pencil snapped in half on the map and shrugged.

"You don't know what people do," I told him. "You don't know if they will turn on you until they do.

▬

The hotel was tucked behind a wealth of overgrown shrubbery, though there had been a gardener once, before his garden shed had become cluttered with dense cobwebs and festering mold in its corners. Negan had taken pliers from the shed while he lived in the hotel and said that the only other things in there had been a bag of compost and a lawn-mower, but the other tools had already been taken inside or looted in the evacuation period.

The shed was at the bottom of a sloping hill, anyway, which meant it offered little height for scoping out the place. I walked beneath the canopy of trees, peering upward. I liked the scent of rot in the forest, liked the dew and wetness that sprinkled the ground from a recent shower.

I found a tree nestled near the edge of the forest with a clear view of the right side of the hotel, where the men had made a makeshift fortress from metal sheets and furniture broken down; it formed a square courtyard in front of a smaller door that had clearly been some kind of emergency-exit before. I marked the tree with a knife. I carved a wonky _S_ into its bark, amused by my poor attempt, which came out spiked and rough. I turned back around and went to find Negan.

▬

I had packed my rucksack with a blanket rolled at the bottom, padded with bottled water and biscuits on top, some more cartridges for back-up, and atop the nest of supplies sat the walkie-talkies that Negan had fiddled with all morning until he was certain he had changed the channels.

I handed him the flares, along with his own rucksack now filled with mostly the same things that were in mine. I slung some old binoculars around my neck and nodded at him. He returned it, then spun around on his heel and walked off toward the front half of the hotel while I walked back to the right-hand side.

▬

Before I climbed the tree, I took my silver-tinted cannister and threw it as high into the air as I could and waited a few seconds. I tried again, much closer to the house. There was a Biter in the woods, too, and it was drawn by the thump of the cannister against the ground. It wobbled toward me and I watched it come closer from the corner of my eye. I let it breach the trees, shakily stepping across a patch of rocks, but nothing came from the hotel.

It was all quiet.

I killed the Biter there on the treeline. It fell backwards from the crush of my knife into its skull, its arms splayed out as it fell. The backside of its skull smacked against a pointed rock and crushed it even more. It sank further down onto the stone, its mouth wide and shocked at its own demise.

▬

So, I climbed the tree, plopped myself down with a grunt and took a moment to admire the scenery, which was mostly a sea of more trees and a few hills miles away from us. The hotel sat directly ahead of me, though, and its roof cut through in a dull navy colour that had faded, with some of the slates having fallen off in patches.

The windows of the top floor were covered in what looked like sheets and papers. I took the binoculars and was about to hold them against my eyes when the walkie-talkie looped around my belt crackled and I heard a familiar voice wade through all that static.

"Paging Mr Herman," he said in a weird, growling tone. "Mr Herman, you have a telephone call at the front desk."

"Negan, I told you to be serious."

"What is more serious than a telephone call at the front fucking desk?"

I dipped my chin against my chest with a drawn-out sigh. "I tested it. If they have marksmen on their second floor, then they didn't take the shot when I threw the cannister. But it would be a hard shot with all those sheets covering their windows."

"Is that right, Mr Herman? Huh. Well, those sheets weren't there when I was living it up in Room 104, doll."

"Stop calling me these names."

"Okay, bossy.".

"Negan. Do your part, now."

"Okay, bossy."

I stared across the bristling trees as if I could see Negan, but he was far from me – and _still_ as annoying as if he stood right beside me.

▬

The door of the hotel opened around noon and a handful of men stepped out into the courtyard, holding rifles of their own, pistols on their hips, knifes swinging from belts. I waited patiently, scanning them for Wilkes. Negan had described them, but I had been taught what Generals looked like, because in the war, my Grandmother had fought in trees like mine. There was a certain way about them, how they stood and dressed themselves.

But the men that wandered the courtyard were not Wilkes. He wore suspenders over a pale blue shirt, rolled to his sleeves. He walked with purpose and slicked back his hair against the sun, speckles of sweat beading on his forehead.

I waited until he lowered his hand. Then, I took the shot.

His body fell backward against the ground; he was a short, stout little man, and the dust rose from the thump of his frame. It had hardly even resettled on his pale flesh before I aimed for the man who had been stood directly beside him, his righthand man, catching him in the throat. It was like a symphony to watch the others slowly fall into action, from pushes and shoves between each other. I had chosen a man in a yellow shirt by the door for the next shoot. I had always loved the colour yellow.

I lowered the muzzle and caught him in the thigh, then raised it once more and shot another man stood nearby – I shot through his left arm and it made the limb seem oddly limp and wobbly, clapping against his side weakly. He clamped the wound with his other hand and I wondered if there had been some kind of nerve cut. But that was already enough. Four of them was fine; two dead, two wounded. It had to start off small, like that.

I thought, ' _this is what you get for all you did to those women Negan told me about_.'

▬

From the walkie-talkie, Negan snapped, "What the fuck was that, Sasha? You missed! I thought your aim was some goddamn –…"

The flare shot up in a dense burst of red and I breathed out a sigh of relief that, for all his grumbling, Negan still held his side of the plan. I sat and watched the hotel through my binoculars. The door had been bolted shut. The bodies lay out in the courtyard, their limbs splayed out like the body of the Biter beneath my tree, like they sunbathed in this glorious weather.

But the sheets trembled on the upper-floor, hastily pulled aside for ghostly faces to peer out. I caught slivers of wide, wet eyes rolling madly around, as well as silhouettes passing the lower windows, always looking out. _Aware_.

"They are afraid," I told him. "We are scaring them. You know what happens when people are scared?"

"You know, when you start talking this way, I get real hot," he replied. "Gets me _real_ –…"

I pressed down on the button of my walkie-talkie to cut him off.

▬

I chewed at some beef-jerky while I watched a small handful of Biters crush dried leaves that littered the ground beneath my tree. I had stretched myself out on my stomach to look down, strangely fascinated by the stumbling way that Biters walked. I saw their blue and grey skulls from overhead, like fish bobbing beneath water. Blurred, smudged outward by the waves, drifting back and forth eternally.

I took another strip from the packet and snapped it between my teeth. I wondered if Negan was all right, because the sun was dipping behind the distant hills and I hadn't heard from him.

"Negan?"

I heard nothing for the next ten minutes and I had started to pack away my things to try and find him, if it was at all possible.

But I heard the static and relaxed against the tree. "Oh, so you do care! That is _sweet_. I'm really welling up over here, you know. Because I was already thinking about how you might pay attention only if I got a Biter to rip my leg off in front of you. Then, before I bled out, I thought I'd look up at you – and _right_ when God takes pity on my one-legged ass and hauls me up to those fluffy clouds – you'd roll your eyes at me – just one – more – time…"

"God wouldn't take you all of you," I said. "But the Biters would."

▬

The door of the hotel opened an inch. I swung forward and gripped my rifle, though I had no intention of using it. I found comfort in its weight in my hand and its sharp points pressed into my chest. But I saw a smaller, thinner form slip out from the door and dart across the courtyard.

It was a young man – perhaps only in his twenties, though his gaunt face had aged him. He was lanky and wore clothes too large for him. He patted around the corpses for something that glistened in the faded light. I realised that he had taken keys from them and immediately ran for the door again.

They had closed it on him and let him bang against it. It was a test. Not for him, but for _me_ , because they had probably known that there was a sniper in the woods around them. I would have put down some money that they had a rough idea of where I was positioned too, purely from the height of their courtyard walls and how Wilkes had fallen.

I assumed they had only been afraid to test their theory. The man was thrown out there like a guinea pig and the shiver of the bed-sheets on the windows only told me that they watched my treeline for the slightest hint that I was still here.

"Negan," I said into the walkie-talkie, "did you change positions?"

"I sure did, buttercup. On the other side, now."

"Shoot the final flare, please."

" _Please_? She must be going soft on me," he crooned. "But for you, I'll happily shoot my –…"

"You said that one before." I held down my button to cut him off and watched another red spark of light flit upward, contrasting the navy-blue splotches pooling from behind the hills.

The door opened – a hand shot out and snatched the man by his shirt, yanking him roughly back inside. I saw his sneaker had slipped off. A few feet away, the Righthand Man rolled onto his side and lifted his head from the dirt. He drooped forward and finally stood, though his arms rocked back and forth. He had heard the boy. He followed right after him and smacked at the door just like the boy had done only a few minutes beforehand.

▬

More Biters trailed from the woods below. The sound that had drawn them in this direction had long since faded, and they probably would have continued onward if they had not heard the low groans of the other Biter already inside the courtyard. They banged against its fences, rattled its chains, and the sheets on the upper floor shivered even more.

I swung my boot back and forth from the edge of my branch. I liked to imagine what happened behind the walls like a puppet-show in which the barricades and sheets that covered the windows were suddenly torn open and each square bloomed with so much light that all I saw came from the silhouettes of these felt puppets flopping around. It was silly. It passed the time, though, and that was all that really mattered, because I preferred to think of that than anything else. Sometimes, even if I tried hard, thoughts of Vasya and Dima. Even Alyosha.

And those were the worst times to think about anything, in those lulls up in the trees. But that had been the same for my Grandmother, and I wished I had gotten to hear more of her stories from the war. Mother hated them, said that children should never know stuff about things like that, and that had been shortly before we had stopped our visits to my Grandmother and Vasya had grown older and I felt that I had still remained the same, unchanging.

▬

The Biters had grown in number. I had anticipated a certain group of them, but they had grown a whole lot more than expected. I counted fifteen already, excluding the Righthand Man circling the courtyard in his agitation. The metal sheets cracked together and brewed a storm of noise for them. But the hotel was silent. I wondered if they had managed to slip out from some exit that nobody had ever told Negan about..

"Negan?" I called, after another hour had passed.

He left me unanswered, though there had been some brief spark of static like he had tried to respond. It settled in my stomach like a stone, and I felt my brows furrow in worry.

I gripped my binoculars to look at the hotel, and that was when the first bullet came; it rocketed across the flesh of my left arm and the binoculars tumbled away from me – they bounced once against the bark and spiralled downward into abyss.

The second, because I had drawn myself up in a raw shiver of pain, embedded itself into the soft doughy flesh of my left thigh and the pain was momentarily muted by the needling agony in my eardrum, like my skull had fractured and the shards of bone ground against each other, over and over.

Shakily, my hand reached for the walkie-talkie and I stared numbly at the rippling trails of blood that emerged from the cuffs of my coat and ran through my fingers. I was unsettled by the warmth, disturbed by the saturated colour contrasted against my skin.

"Sasha?" the walkie-talkie crackled. "Did you hear that?"

I never heard it right for all that humming in my eardrum, but I _felt_ it. I gripped my thigh and forced out my leg behind me, though my teeth sank into my lips and torn chunks from the sheer throbbing pain, but it focused me on the targets, because I caught a glimpse of a blue shirt between the trees. I took aim, lowered the muzzle and counted between the waves of discomfort.

"Some made it out," Negan said through the static. "But I don't know how. Fuck, I'm nearly there – …"

In the courtyard, a few men had dared step out from their hideout and took aim at my trees. I shot with all the speed that I had within me, but it was clumsy firing and I was more panicked that they had figured me out. I had thought myself invincible, somehow.

I had thought that we had the upper-hand, and that it was the only way it would remain.

There had been a safety in the trees whose bark now turned black and menacing in their constant swaying, like they conspired to hide the men from sight, to swallow the hotel in their darkness and conceal them from me.

But the men fell in rows; two, three, four, until the courtyard was made of lumps then torn apart from the famished Biters that roamed there in its depths. I shot them, too, studded their bodies with bullets so furiously that the lumps blended into one pile and layered the dirt in a patchwork of blood and soiled old clothes and baseball-caps blown away in the wind and eyes turned blank and unseeing.

There was still in the man in the blue shirt. I would not find him from here and tried to climb with my injured thigh made dense and wet from all the blood soaking through my jeans. I fell on the last part and thumped against the ground. I rolled with the pain and grasped the wound, a sharp throb of pain forcing a whistle of agony through my teeth.

I saw a smudge of blue and looked up at the barrel pointed between my brows, pressed there for good measure. It was not cold like I had imagined, but terribly warm. I was not sure if it was the sweat which dotted along my temples that made it warm, but it burned me, made me feel nauseous and sore.

The man rolled wild, yellowish eyes at me. "You with Negan? I saw him. Knew that bastard would survive somehow. Guys like that always make it outsomehow. But Wilkes said that a sick dog has to be put down, and Negan is one sick fucking _dog_. Nothing but a cancer, a tumour, he went right through our –…"

More warmth sprinkled me like sunlight.

His body slumped sideways and spots of brain matter speckled the leaves and my face and my arms raised to protect myself. I saw his wide stare focused on me through a tunnel, and all the colour in this world had seeped from its edges and drained from it. Negan stood behind him with a pistol, pretending to blow at its barrel like he blew away smoke, his lips held in a bright smile. He toed the corpse with his boot.

"Were you gonna bite, little doggie? Or were you gonna just keep _yap_ ping?"

His eyes lowered and he saw the blood. "Well, shit, Sasha. Did you get 'em all?"

I tried to speak and it came out coated in pain.

"It's all right," he said. "Take your time, sweetheart. But you gotta tell me if you got them all before we patch that wound up, okay? Can't go near that hotel without knowing where those guys are."

Like a child coaxed to speak, I answered him. "Yes. I counted. And the dead."

"Atta girl. Now, I'm gonna carry you, but I might hurt that leg. I promise I'll be as gentle as I can, but it might happen no matter what I do. Only a few seconds of that pain and we'll be someplace safe," he said calmly, slowly. "Do you trust me?"

He had already bent to slither his hands beneath my legs and hoist me up, because it was clear that I would only stumble and collapse if I tried it myself. I was terrified that they had sliced some crucial part of me and my leg had become useless, but I felt my feet, I felt his hands grip me tight. I _felt_.

I felt every bounce in his run as he made a beeline for the courtyard and I saw his eyes flash toward the new Biters that flocked from the trees on our right to stumble behind us. But he was fast and he was determined and he dipped around the dead bodies toward that door without losing sight of it.

Once we made it inside the hotel, he settled me on the floor with all the care that he could manage. He then stood and turned back to the door, quickly bolting it shut before the first Biter could trip over those bodies and catch us. Its body battered against the door but it held steady. I thought, ' _if those men had not opened it in the first place, they would have made it. I would never have been able to shoot them, and it would have been me who was hunted_.'

I looked to my left down the length of this hallway. It had a hideous pattern on its carpets, like mad, frizzing lines that ran over one another and the walls had been painted a deep, hideous maroon that only made the hall seem smaller, like it fell around me more its ceiling lowered and its walls crept inward and Negan pushed through its warped form to reach me.

He hauled me up against his chest and dragged me toward another room, down the hall. He knew where it had been, he settled me on a bed in there. It was dark and stale and I hated the doily curtains that reminded me of the cabin.

▬

I dreamt of passing ships and dictionaries spilling from rucksacks with English words on the covers.

▬

I awoke to Negan pressing wadded up bandages against my leg and fiddling with tweezers while he talked and talked to me about things he liked to think about and things he never liked to think about and he said that Lucille was both of those things, and the tweezers sank into the black spot on my thigh that wept no matter how much pressure he pushed against it, and he talked some more while I swam through crashing waves of agony and wondered if it had been this hard for Dima to breathe, too.

▬

I dipped into that blurry place beyond the doily curtains and found myself on that chair in the cabin. I looked around myself and saw that Alyosha held a pillow against Dima, and Dima had stopped thrashing, and there was a knocking on the door.

I stood from the chair and walked with a funny limp to answer it, glancing down at the corpse that dragged itself over the wood and touched the leather of my boots with its hands that had been smashed with a hammer, its bones poking out from blue skin.

It was Vasya, and he had returned with help for us. Behind him, there were hundreds of corpses swarming from the woods to help carry Dima someplace better.

I told him, _you're too late, brother. He's already gone. But where did you go?_

▬

I never did enough to find Vasya. I was afraid to find him. I had sensed what I would find at the gas station if I had wandered a little further; it had been a dreadful thrum that radiated from the building and crept along the road until it curled beneath my boots and followed me with every step. The interior had been stained in that frosted blue colour from artificial lights even though they had long since been turned off, and there had been sticky footprints of blood all over.

I never found him. But I _knew_ he had been in that place, sometime.

▬

The room had grown dim and quiet. Negan slept on the floor alongside my bed. He was so tall that his boots inched beyond the end of my bed, and his long arms were behind his head like makeshift pillows. He had boarded the door with a dresser that he had clearly dragged along the carpet, because its strands had been left tattered and marked in black streaks. His eyelid was still coloured in a faded brown; his lip had only just scabbed over.

"Negan?" I whispered.

"I saved your ass," he murmured sleepily. He shifted, letting out a sigh. "I took that slug outta your thigh. We're even. I don't owe you _shit_."

▬

In the morning, he pulled another roll of bandages from his rucksack and snipped off the blood-soaked wrap that covered my thigh. It had hurt to peel away that crusted bandage which crackled with flakes of dried rust. I was already sagging against the pillows he had placed behind me, watching him with blank eyes as he moved around the room.

He sifted around his rucksack and slipped something into the sleeve of his shirt. He sat on the edge of my bed with a quiet, reserved smile on his face. He seemed far more sombre, but he reached for my hand and turned it to place a small chocolate bar on my palm.

"Found it in one of the other rooms. No sharing, this time," he said. "Not like that granola bar – which was dry as _fuck_ , by the way."

I laughed. I took great joy in slicing open its packaging and breathing in its familiar scent. I cracked it in half and held it out to him, smiling at him and nudging him with my hand when he shot me a weary glare. "We share it," I said. "Because this place is ours now."

His eyes bore into mine for a moment longer, before he reached out and took his half. We savoured it, slowly placing each square onto our tongues and letting it melt there. I pulled my legs closer against me, careful not to hurt my thigh, and he moved back against the wall with his legs stretched out.

We sat there for a few hours, though we did not say very much at all. It was a comfort. He seemed distracted, lost in his own mind. I was tired and worn and felt the stab of pain in my thigh after a little while. I slumped on my pillows and tried not to fall asleep again.

▬

But I saw the cabin and heard the tinkle of the wind-chime and wondered just when the taste of melted chocolate had left me.

▬

He had brought fresh sheets for the beds and helped me stand while he changed them. He was not like he had been over the past few days before we had taken the hotel. He was methodical. I heard him in the halls while I rested. He hammered, he dragged furniture around. But he stayed with me in the afternoons and he slept on the floor throughout the night.

▬

One of those afternoons, he shook my shoulder and I bolted upward from his touch, frightened because the room had changed and I felt something cold against my spine. I was slouched against it, balanced awkwardly, and Negan quickly rushed around in front of me, crouching down to hold my arms. He looked pale, tired, his eyelids flushed a reddish colour when before they had been that light brown.

"Sasha, I'm just moving you to another room so I can try to clean your leg," he said. "It doesn't look – I think we need to make sure it stays clean, all right? I'm just gonna wash it and then we're going right back to the room we were in before, okay?"

The odd, pleading tone was not like him. It frightened me. I moved my hands around me and felt cold metal. I was in a wheelbarrow and it seemed almost funny until I realised that the hotel was silent and bleak around us and Negan had paused to run his hand over his face. He really seemed much more haggard and I looked down at my own thigh and saw it was lined in a whitish-yellow colour.

I felt deflated, drained of strength from the mere sight of it. I tipped my head back and was more than surprised when Negan rushed to cup the back of my skull with his hand, gently pushing me forward. He saw that I was awake and let out a deep breath.

"You fainted before," he said. "In the bedroom. Don't you remember?"

It hurt to think at all, really. But I remembered something in particular. "We ate chocolate."

"Yeah," he said. "That was a couple of days ago."

I furrowed my brows and peered down the hall. "Days," I echoed; my voice cracked, my eyes filled with tears that soon dripped along my cheeks, smeared away with my clenched fists. "I don't remember."

I imagined Dima on his cot with his own eyes wet and leaking and seeking me out in the blackness of the cabin, his skin peppered in beading droplets of sweat, his chest shuddering in horrid gasps for every breath drawn into his lungs. He had slept in fits.

We had never told him what day it was and I wondered if he knew that time had passed at all, confined against his cot, trapped in some eternal realm where only the cabin existed and the rest of the world ended at the edge of its porch.

I hated the hotel and its bleak walls, its dark colours clashing against one another. I thought Dima was at the other end of the hall, right in front of us, his body contorted by his horrid white pallor and his chest caved in, arms dangling at his sides.

It drew a swell of nausea into my mouth and tainted my words, for I blurted out, "My boyfriend died like this. He hurt his leg, too. He died like this, in the early days. Not from a bite, not from anything that the dead really did to him, when I think about it. Negan, I don't want to die the way that he did."

Negan was quiet. He swallowed and looked at the carpet beneath his boots. "You won't die," he said. "Because I'm here. And I won't let it happen. So, quit that blubbering shit and grow some nuts, Sasha."

▬

Though I had imagined him to be immature, Negan was void of his usual jokes and mockery. Instead, he undressed the wound and cleaned it with lukewarm water he had boiled in a pot earlier, then patted it down with disinfectant. It burned so badly it drew fresh, stinging tears from eyes dried out and not once did he make a joke or comment on my teary nature.

He brought a pair of sweatpants that he had taken from another room in the hotel and helped me shimmy them around myself, tugging at the drawstrings. I held onto his shoulders while he pulled them up, and dared ask, "Who is Lucille?"

"You remembered _that_ , huh?" he muttered. "Goddamn angel, that's what she was. She married a jerk like me, even though people told her – Fuck it. What does it matter what happened then? She got sick, that's what mattered."

"I'm sorry."

He was quiet. "She said there was no reason and it just happened, because people got sick like that," he answered eventually. "But I know what it was. She did, too, in her own way."

"I didn't mean for it to hurt – hurt _you_ , I mean."

"I know," he said. "I know what you meant. But it doesn't fucking _matter_."

▬

The hotel was so full of winding hallways that it was hard to even tell if it was raining, sometimes. The windowpanes were stiff and coated in a dust that blurred the dense forest of trees all around it, the curtains so heavy and full of folds that it muffled the world in such a manner that, once closed, it felt as if nothing else existed but the _Splendid_. We had learned its name from notepads tucked into its drawers, alongside Bibles with condoms pressed thoughtfully between its pages.

Negan thought that was the funniest thing, his mood lightening considerably as he pushed me around in the wheelbarrow. I was not sure that I really needed it, but there was something childish and fun to be found in being pushed around by Negan.

The _Splendid_ opened into a sprawling lobby of walnut and white-washed panelling, but the men before us had bolted its looming front doors and blocked them with bookshelves turned sideways. On the left of the entrance sat a small reception desk with keys neatly lined on a wooden board with carved numbers, and on its right, a hall that led toward its ballroom and bathrooms and elevators.

There was also a wide staircase with photographs along its wall; some showed the _Splendid_ coated in a blanket of snow and others showed guests stood together at parties with arms looped around shoulders and champagne glasses clinked against one another in some kind of celebration..

Then, the staircase split into two halls and bedrooms lined both sides. Or, one could continue onto the next staircase on the right that led up onto the last floor of the hotel, with a similar split in the hall that branched off into the bedrooms; four bedrooms on one side, four on the other.

But some parts had been cut off, too, even more after Negan had left the hotel. He described it to me, because I could not yet manage the climb. I had been left more than tired from the past few days, even if they had been spent in bed.

There was a door near the reception desk that he had not mentioned, its frame also covered by a bookshelf turned on its side. I pointed at it and Negan saw what I wanted to know.

"Leads down to the basement."

"You're sure they cannot escape?"

Negan stared at the door. "We'll deal with it when you're healed.".

He pushed me toward a door that needed another key which he took from his pocket, unlocking it and swinging it open with a flourish. I saw rows of shelving all throughout the room, stocked flush with canned food and sacks of flour and jars of pickled goods. I stared at each shelf in amazement, then tried to climb out of the wheelbarrow.

"Did the nurse say you could do that? Sit your ass back down."

I fell back against the cold metal.

"Good," he smirked. "Though I do wish I had one of them nurse uniforms. I'd look _damn_ good. Now, my lady, what do you think of some mushy peas and potatoes for dinner?"

It was a combination that I never would have chosen before, but we had been snacking on granola bars and beans for so long that anything different sounded so much more delicious. I nodded, and he scoured the shelves for whatever he could take.

"Can't we eat here?"

"No, we'll eat in the room. I can block the door, I wouldn't have to worry so much about some freak getting in somehow – or worse, one of the Biters making it in and munching on _us_."

He dropped two cans into my arms and gripped the handles of the wheelchair. He then hunched over and scrunched his features into an odd squint with his tongue held between his lips. I raised my eyebrows at him and felt a smile pull at my lips when he spoke in a funny accent, making his already husky voice even lower and grislier.

"Now, Madame, may I return you to your chambers? Which room was it, again? Ah, yes, 104. What a beautiful room – well, before that…unfortunate… _murder_."

I laughed as he began to pick up speed while he pushed me, turning a corner madly, though he made sure that I did not topple out and he did not trip over himself.

"Negan, what is this accent meant to be? Where are you supposed to have come from?"

"Why, I don't know what you mean, Madame. I've always been in this hotel, I've never left it. Some would say I'm _part_ of the hotel. I _am_ the hotel."

▬

Within a week, I could walk by myself. I felt a low throb in my thigh that had become familiar to me, but I could still wander. I looked into the other bedrooms which were copies of our own, though often with the furniture in different positions or littered in the leftovers from the men that had been here before us. I found magazines and books and notepads and brought them back to our own room. I climbed those stairs and looked down the halls that had been painted a lighter blue.

The _Splendid_ induced that same discomfort in me as the gas station. There was something about all its rooms lined one after the other and the nearly identical pattern of the walls and paintings and furniture that made it feel like I turned and turned and walked and walked but ended up in the same place always, like a loop.

From down the hall, I heard him call for me.

The bedrooms flitted like a kaleidoscope around me, flashing bursts of colour with each door passed, but the colours had been muted and dulled. He had spoken from the lobby and I stood at the top of those old, scuffed stairs to look down at him.

He was poised in front of the door that led down to the basement, his hands slack at his side and his head slightly tilted like a confused puppy. He lifted a slow, lazy hand and pawed at a knife sheathed by his belt, a flashlight bumping against his leg on the other side.

"I need to go down to the basement."

"Why?"

His eyes slid to look at me, but there was nothing in them. "Before they tossed me out on my ass, my good pals tossed something of mine down there. I want it back."

"But the Biters –…".

"The Biters will try to climb the stairs to reach me, and I'll control them with the door. The bookshelf will hold it for me."

"Negan, that's too dangerous."

He smiled. "It'll be worth it."

I hovered at the top of the staircase, an anxious knot tightening in my stomach. "I can't let you do that, it's –…"

You don't _let_ me do shit," he said calmly. "But if you wanna help, grab something that'll crush their skulls."

Negan moved forward with a grunt and pulled away that bookshelf, his face gnarled with anger as he worked. I dropped onto the first step on the staircase, my thigh aching and my hands clammy with sweat, because the bookshelf screeched against the wooden floorboards and I knew that if there were still some Biters down in that basement like he told me, then they would hear it and herd toward the door. I started to thump down those steps one by one, though I was unaware of myself.

I had nothing that could crush skulls. But I quickly glanced around the room and saw a splint of wood against the wall, clearly intended as another plank to cover the windows. I brought my boot down on the wood and cracked it, taking the part that had the best pointed edge.

Negan touched the knob and turned it. The hinges screamed.

Cautiously, I crossed the room to stand beside him. There came the soft wading of water from below, but we could see nothing more than a black pit stretching down from the stairs in front of us. From those inky pools, there came snarls and groans and wooden stairs creaking against heavy weight, and soon pale faces wavered before us like a mirage.

"Boiler burst," Negan said. "Maybe some pipes, too. Seems all the plumbing ran through here."

I looked up at him and felt that there was no question in whether the pipes had burst or not. He _knew_.

One Biter fell against the top of the steps and Negan crushed its skull with his boot. He took down the next, and I took another. Each Biter had been even more badly rotted by the water, which had eaten away their skin in some parts and made it bloated and puffy in others. Their swollen faces had sealed their eyes and ballooned the flesh of their lips so heavily that it looked as if they might simply burst from the sheer pressure.

They tumbled back down into the water whenever he pushed them, but soon we glimpsed their fattened hands clutching at the staircase to clamber over other corpses to find us, their earlobes swinging against their jawlines from how badly they had festered in the water, their legs peeling off in strips that slid along the stairs and slithered between the gaps.

Eventually, no more Biters climbed to find us. The basement was quiet apart from the ripple of water, and Negan scrubbed his knife against his jeans to clean away the gunk that had stuck there. He pulled the door open even wider and pushed those Biters down once more, taking to the steps himself. He loosened his flashlight from his belt and waved it below.

There was an ocean of black ink down there, interspersed with floating corpses that drifted with limbs entangled, their white eyeballs reflecting against the harsh, beading yellow light that he darted around.

It seemed that the water was high enough that the corpses could float. Negan continued down, though there was a hesitance in him.

"Negan, you shouldn't –…"

I was interrupted by a whining creak that worsened into a sudden crack and Negan fell, a step breaking beneath his boot. He dropped the flashlight and its yellow light spun away from us, plopping into those coal depths, though an orb told us where it had landed.

He had fallen through the gap in the step, but not completely into the water. He was spared only by the fact that his other leg had gotten stuck and held him in place.

"Fuck," he hissed, his teeth drawn against his lower lip. "Fuck me. Sasha, stay there."

I took about seven steps down to reach him, snaking my arms beneath his armpits. He was much heavier and my spine ached from the effort, but I pulled while he gripped the railings and pushed with his other leg not yet trapped by the wooden plank.

The water lapped at the bottom of the staircase and I was unnerved by how sentient it seemed, like its edges moved further and further up just to slither around us and bring us right back down the next wave.

Negan righted himself. "I told you to stay there.".

"Maybe you owe me again," I said..

"Fat chance. Now you really have to stay here. If that wound wasn't already infected, it will be once you touch that fucking gunk down there. You got that?"

He was weirdly intense, his face lowered to press close against mine; not quite touching, but still close enough that I felt the need to push back onto the step behind me to move away from him.

"Fine," I said.

"Swear it?"

I hesitated a moment too long.

"Sasha - …"

"How will I know you're all right? What if there's a Biter down there that we missed?"

He eased away from me on his own accord, seeming mollified by my question. He softened, his mouth loosening from its snarl. "I'll – I'll whistle to you. So, you'll know I'm still doing fine. And you won't have to worry about me when you hear it."

"Okay."

He held out his pinkie-finger like a child and pushed it into my chest until I rolled my eyes and hooked mine around his own, shaking twice. He grinned and turned around, descending further into the water. It bulged around his legs, swallowed him to his hips. But he could walk through it, and I lost sight of him within a few seconds, even though I dipped down to try and watch him.

I heard his movements and waited for his whistle, which came soon enough. It was a low, drawn out sound that echoed around the basement and reassured me. I was not sure just what he searched for, but I heard him take deep breaths and dip beneath the water, and I was worried that it might make him ill.

The corpses speckled the black water and I saw them only because of their lilac-coloured skin. Their hands reached out like they wanted to hold each other, but they bumped together and drifted apart, over and over.

I heard his whistle. It made my own eardrum ache to hear it. I listened for it anyway.

Though it had been maybe ten minutes, it felt much longer and I started to push further down into the water myself. I was afraid that he had gotten lost somehow, and he had stopped whistling soon after that, too. The icy water soaked my calves and drench my knees. I peered around as if I might see him, but it was pitch-black.

"Negan?"

I made the whistle noise myself. I made it twice, and it faltered on the second time, because my mouth had turned slack and dry from fear.

Then, he appeared. He was pale and shivering, his own bluish-tinted lips pushing out the whistle, even if it came out hoarse and cold itself. I grabbed onto his arms and helped him find the steps beneath his boots, because he was sluggish. The water had probably been colder than he anticipated.

"Fuck, those assholes on the Titanic weren't fucking around with this shit," he grumbled.

He held something beneath his jacket, cradling it against his chest like it was the most precious thing he had ever known. Even when we climbed out of the basement and slammed its door shut, and he fell forward onto the wooden floorboards, he made sure not to land on it. He turned it into his arms and took the brunt of the fall on his sides. He pulled it out carefully and placed it lovingly beside him.

And I saw that it was a baseball-bat coated in barbed wire.

Negan was laughing. He rocked against the ground from side to side, all the while laughing with his blue lips stretched open and his shoulders hunched like they had been before, in his little pretence as an old, creepy concierge that lived in the hotel. But I was not sure what had sparked it. It reverberated into the hotel, up its winding stairs and back down to slam against me.

"Negan," I started, "how did you know it was the boiler that had burst down there? And the pipes?"

He slowed in his rocking, but still held his lips in a grin. "Two boilers, I'm pretty sure. I heard the old pipes burst, too."

"It happened when you were here?"

"Oh, it happened when I was _down_ there."

"I don't understand. What happened down there?"

"Well, a lot of shit _burst_ – but not the pipes, exactly. Some guys got hurt down there, and it went to shit, and the pipes burst, so the rest of us had to get out fast, you know."

None of it made sense and I was sure it was not my English that made it so. It was deeper than that. It was something instinctual that went beyond language. He was smiling lazily at me. He was calm.

"Is that what really happened?"

He cocked his head like he had earlier, when he was studying the door. "Are you asking me if I'm _lying_?"

"Yes."

"Well, shit. I asked the woman to grow some fucking nuts, and she did." He yawned, scratched his stubble, and smiled some more. "Sasha, look – the system in this place was never fair. If Wilkes liked you, he gave you an extra portion. There was no earning it, no fairness to it. I made suggestions."

"You tried to take over."

"I made _suggestions_ ," he said again, more firmly, so that I felt I could not speak back. "And some of them were not well-received. So, fine. But I never did more than that."

"If Wilkes hated you, he would have thrown you away. But he let you stay."

"Because he fucking _needed_ me. Men are not expendable in this world and that is just about the only fucking thing we ever agreed on – me and the old man. Who would clean out the rooms in this old dive, huh? Who would help on raids? Him? No way. _Me._ Me and the other guys who put our necks on the fucking line. And for _what_? So he could give more food to the guy who licked his ass more than the rest of us were willing to do?"

"They didn't all hurt women, did they?"

"If one allows it, they all allow it. That's how I see it."

I had an awful, thumping pain in my head; it was more than a headache, more than a migraine, and I wanted to blot out all the light and colour in the room that seemed to seep into my skull and saturate my brain in its denseness, until my boots stumbled backward and I struggled to find the wall to help me balance. That heavy, needling whine in my eardrum blistered in all its tempestuous fury and I rocked to the side. My shoulder bumped against a wall and I clamped a hand over my ear.

"You're not thinking about what we can do now, doll," he said, like he was singing, a lilt in his tone that only disturbed me more. "This place could be something beautiful. Sure, the décor is ugly as _sin_. Place hasn't seen new wallpaper since the goddamn seventies. But it has space, if we clear out those other floors. It has supplies – what's left of them after these pigs ran through them, but you saw how good we have it."

"You weren't honest. In the clearing, when I met you. Later, too – when we planned this."

"Because I didn't fucking _know_ like I know you now, sweetheart. Sure, you saved my life. But we weren't _friends_. This world is a pretty fucked up place lately, or haven't you noticed? How could I have known whether to trust you or not? Look, think about it. _You_ could've been that girl on the highway that that sick fuck dragged behind a van to get his fucking rocks off. He fucking killed her too, you know. And they wanted to let him _stay_. I mean, are you really questioning _me_? Haven't I shown you that I'm looking out for the both of us here? You can't make me out to be the bad guy between us. I know what you're like."

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't feel a _damn_ thing shooting those guys out there. I bet you don't feel anything now, either. Only annoyed that I didn't make it all crystal-fucking-clear and spell out every little detail. You heard they had supplies, you heard they had space – the whole ' _they hurt women_ ' shit was just to make yourself sound better for doing it. But you made the plan. I might have tweaked a few things, but you made it."

I unfurled from against the wall and glared at him, fists clenched. "Tweaked? What do you mean now?"

"They were gonna let that rapist live. It was the final fucking straw for me. I went down to the basement to kill him. He was assigned duty down there and I knew it was the right goddamn time to get the bastard. And I fucking _did_ it. The only fucking thing I regret is that I dropped Lucille before I could really crack his skull open. But it was even better, because he was down there twitching and freaking the fuck out with half his brains spilling out – could you believe he even _had_ some in there?"

Negan's smile faded. He shrugged his shoulders, shaking his head at me.

"Then the other guys came down. I tried to talk to 'em. Tell 'em how it should have been, how Wilkes was the one letting a goddamn rapist in their group - I tried to show them how they should have wanted me to do what I did."

"That's what they were going to kill you for, in the clearing. You killed one of your own."

"He wasn't one of my fucking own," Negan spat, moving closer to me. "He wasn't _shit_ to me. None of them were. Means to a fucking end. I wanted a better fucking system here. Wilkes had found himself a goldmine and he didn't even know what to _do_ with it. I wanted better – and I got it. I got you, Sasha. I got Lucille – isn't she beautiful?"

He held out the bat with gentle hands, unafraid of its barbed edges. His eyes held so much emotion for it that I recoiled from him again, unsettled by his intensity. He stood too close again, bending low to look into my eyes. His lips peeled back into a grin.

"Don't you forget now – you helped us get here. But hey, what the fuck does it matter what we did to get it? It only matters that we got it, and it only matters what we're gonna do with it. So, you can get with the fucking program, or you can –…"

He trailed off. He was smiling again, like we were two old friends joking around someplace much brighter and softer than the dull, dark tones of the hotel.

I licked my lips. "Or _what_?"

He whistled that same low whistle that he had made in the basement. "Or _what_ ," he repeated, tilting his head to bump his forehead against mine, his smile wide and amused. "That is the fucking question to keep in that little head of yours, Sasha. Or _what_?"

▬


	5. five: the memory

_five: the memory_

* * *

Sitting atop the staircase, I stared into the black depths of the water that filled the basement, watching those corpses that drifted in its stagnant laps. I had remembered little details that Negan had mentioned; bolts attached to the basement door and padlocks added for good measure and there had never been any steel between us and the Biters. He had lied very well, because the door was made from flimsy wood on rusted hinges. It was not strong at all. He had _lied_ , all right. He had lied with the same ease and thoughtlessness that it took him to blink.

It was all that water that held the dead in that basement. Their flesh had turned lilac and floated away in chunks stripped from their bones with every weak ripple against the stairs and the other pieces of furniture that bopped there in the water alongside them.

I glimpsed the hard cases of suitcases like the shells of insects glinting against the faint light behind me. They had either been cast down into the basement or left there before the Fall had happened. I saw, in that opaque black pool, worn pairs of shoes, too. I saw books and old candle-holders roam the gentle curls in the water. I often heard the groan of pipes that had long since burst, letting out odd creaks and whistles.

The sound was much like how Negan had whistled, before.

It started low and bloomed just a little bit louder. I looked down there and wondered how much more he had lied about. He called them white lies, but I had been certain that there was more. Perhaps Wilkes had never beaten his men. Perhaps he had never bashed any skulls.

I imagined Negan plucking Lucille from her coveted spot alongside him where he slept, imagined his tall frame slinking downstairs into the basement where that rapist worked, imagined him drawing it all out with his usual grin plastered across his lips until he swung Lucille and splattered himself in spurts of blood and chunks of brain flecking against his cheeks.

He must have swung and hit a pipe or the boiler, must have done something to destroy the basement. He would have been smiling even when those pipes burst around him and the other men came to haul him away.

I imagined his pain when he realised that Lucille had been left behind in the water, sinking downward until she bumped against the floor and then rose again. It had been cold, that water. It seemed to hurt him more than she had felt that coldness than himself. I wondered if he was a little unhinged for how he spoke about his baseball-bat. But I understood, in a way.

I still looked at photographs of Dima and talked aloud to him in Russian, so that Negan could not know what I told him if he happened to overhear my words, because I told Dima that Negan made me a little nervous, sometimes.

I told him that I liked Negan, but he had funny moods, like how Alyosha used to have funny moods. I told him that Negan preferred that we never slept in separate rooms and he blocked the door with a dresser, but I was not afraid of him for _that_. I was more afraid for something that I had not found the name for – not in English, not in Russian. It was more of a feeling, I told him.

Instinct, maybe, and it screamed that Negan wanted to look out for me in his own way.

But that was just it, I told Dima: it had to be _his_ own way.

▬

Within the first month, I took three Polaroids and tucked them into my diary. I took a photograph of the ballroom with its cherry-wood walls and lush red curtains draped on either side of the stage. There was a sliver of the bar on the right, though it could not quite capture the sticky countertop and the shards of glass that cracked beneath the soles of my boots while I explored its cabinets and counted its used bottles of alcohol.

The second photograph was taken from atop the stairs that led into the basement. The stairs held the light best, every wooden splintered illuminated until the stairs disappeared into the black hole of the basement itself, and there was no colour beyond that. Just speckles of lilac that seemed more like orbs of dust caught in the lens.

I took the third photograph in the doorway of another bedroom upstairs, and it was more of a candid, because I had captured Negan looking at me without that cockiness staining his features. His skin was made paler by the flash, his eyes a brighter shade.

I was not sure what to call the emotions on his face, the expression that looked reflective and somehow still blank, like he looked someplace behind me even though his eyes had been focused on me. But it was my favourite photograph of him. It made him look young and less – less hollow.

Because Negan looked so _hollow_ , sometimes, when he was least aware of himself.

He was like a doll that sat limp and forgotten in a corner, until he felt that I was watching him too closely and then his chest puffed and his arms shifted and he filled all his hollowness with hot air that lifted him from the ground. It pushed him around the hotel, it made his mouth part for his words and it made him hold onto his strength for just that little bit longer.

But then night fell, and it was his turn for watch, and he deflated against the wall to look at the woods, that bright shade blown from his eyes as easily as it had been when the flash had fizzled out on the camera.

▬

I wanted to talk to him about it. I wanted to _talk_. But the words lodged themselves in my throat with their spiked edges and cut me whenever I tried.

▬

Negan talked almost constantly. He always talked while we walked around the hotel and checked its perimeters and he talked while smashing Lucille through the mushy skulls of Biters and he talked while we trekked back into the hotel and he talked while I sat and cleaned my rifle and he talked while we went into the ballroom to walk around and he talked while we played cards and he talked while he spread out blankets on the mattress that he had placed on the floorboards of our bedroom and he talked while I fell asleep.

I liked that about him. If I had asked, he would have said that I hated it, but really I liked it. I listened all the time, even when he thought that I was already asleep, because sometimes he mentioned Lucille and sometimes he mentioned her like she was still beside him.

“She was always too good for me,” he would say. “Everybody knew it. Hell, she probably knew it too. She was always too good for me.”

Then he would fall quiet.

I scooted to peer down at him, like he formed the waves at the bottom of a cliffside. He watched me, his eyes wet from the silver light that settled between the gaps in the curtains. I pulled my arm out from beneath me and held my hand out to him. His stare drifted away from mine to look at it, like he struggled to understand.

I touched his cheek.

I lay flat on my stomach to stay that way, my arm soon flushing with static that tingled and made it numb. His skin was dry, almost dusted. There was a comfort in that. I had rarely touched others, but I felt that he needed it. It was only time that he ever stopped speaking.

I took my turn and said, “I don’t think you ever tell me the truth about anything but Lucille.”

I pulled away from him and settled against the mattress. I held my arm over my eyes to block out that moonlight. His blankets moved, his boots bumped the floorboards. I saw the silhouette of him from my peripheral. He had sat up from the floor and rested his arms over his knees, staring ahead of himself like he had been stirred from a bad dream.

I left him like that while I slept.

▬

Birdsong spilled into that spot where he had been, his blankets curled together in their creases. He was silent while we walked around the hotel and checked its perimeters, silent while smashing Lucille through the mushy skulls of Biters, silent while we trekked back into the hotel and silent while I sat and cleaned my rifle and silent while we went into the ballroom and silent while we played cards and silent while he spread out blankets on the mattress that he had placed on the floorboards of our bedroom and silent while I tried to fall asleep without the sound of him.

I missed the sound of his voice filling all that horrid space in the hotel.

▬

In the morning, it was like nothing had ever happened. He talked and joked and mocked and it brought me an odd sense of relief to hear it. But I had that same tinny whistle in my eardrum and maybe it made me more glum than I really felt. I slunk from the ballroom while he built towers from cards and knocked them down, before he built them up once more.

His dark eyes watched while I crossed the room and watched further still.

It was not like the old days. There were no doctors around with stethoscopes slung around their necks and there were no pharmacies to offer medication not already pilfered and torn open by looters, sprinkled on linoleum floors. I had to burrow beneath blankets and pull the pillow around my head like a buffer but the whistle came louder and louder.

It often felt as if a bumblebee had stuffed itself into my eardrum and gotten itself stuck, rattling its fat body against the edges to push itself back out. It either popped out and cleared my eardrum of sound, or it tried to squeeze itself further into my skull.

▬

When the sound dimmed, I pulled off the pillow and saw that Negan stood in the doorway, his face as blank as it had been in that photograph taken of him in the hall. He had a deck of cards in his hands. The mattress dipped from his weight and he sat atop the blankets. He shuffled the deck and dealt me one half while he took the other. We played all afternoon.

Then, when he felt he had waited long enough, he asked, “How did it happen?”

He held an ace and tossed it onto the pile. We were supposed to slam our hands down onto the cards if we found a matching pair, but he stared at me so intensely that I was certain he would not notice a match.

I lifted my shoulders in a light shrug, but I felt that he would not drop it until he had been answered; until he had the answer that he _wanted_.

“There were bombings in the woods where we stayed,” I said. “Well, near where we stayed, anyway. And the explosions made my eardrum _pop_ – like a little noise there that comes back every once in a while. I don’t know what it means for my ear.”

“Is that how your boyfriend was hurt? The explosions?”

I placed another card; his followed soon after. My turn, then his. Mine and his.

“No. Many days before that, we found a Biter who was caught in a bear-trap and we thought – we thought it was shock or something like it that made him look the way he did. It never occurred to us that he could be – _dead_. My boyfriend tried to help him and he slipped in the stream, on the rocks. He cut his leg and got an infection, I think. It made him very ill.”

“Slipped on the fucking _rocks_? Holy _shit_. What a shitty fucking way to go out, huh? I mean, you’re out here surviving and your little boyfriend –…”

There was a matching pair on the pile between us, but the cards were forgotten. They slopped onto the bed and fell onto the floorboards and still neither of us looked away from one another. Embarrassment, rage and hurt muddled together and left an imprint of red on my cheeks and along the nape of my neck. I had witnessed the death of his light-hearted smile and saw its rebirth as remorse.

I decided that I hated him, that I had been right all along about him. His funny moods were not really moods at all – they were him, at his core, and all the rest was whatever he had coated over himself to _seem_ kind.

“Fuck, Sasha. I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly. “I just meant –…”

I stared into his eyes. “You were right when you said Lucille was too good for you.”

He recoiled only slightly. “Yeah,” he said finally. “She sure was. But I’m sorry anyway. You know, I don’t always try to be an asshole. I guess I was just born with that kind of talent, huh?”

He tried another smile, though it was watery and humourless. I leaned back against the headboard and felt withered, like all my petals had turned brown and rotten. “It took a long time for him to die. For my boyfriend to die.”

Negan sighed. “Yeah. Took a long time for Lucille, too. But I think I killed her many times over before cancer finally got her.”

I felt like a penny had plopped down my throat and bumped against every rib on its way down, thrown back and forth between my organs until it dropped into my stomach and settled there. “I’m sorry for her.”

“Yeah, well, being sorry don’t do shit for her now.” He smiled again, a little more brightly this time. “But I’m sure she’d appreciate it all the same.”

“What do you mean when you say you killed her?”

“I wasn’t good to her. I lied a lot. I made her doubt herself. I made her –…” He drew back. He shook his head and looked down at his hands. “But she let me stay with her in the hospital. Let me sleep beside her even after –…I slept on the goddamn floor the first few nights, until I could take an armchair or one of those little cots. Anything. I would have slept on nails to be beside her. I would have done anything.”

“Maybe this is how she forgave you,” I said. “Because you made the effort.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I had just worn her out so much that she lost the will to fight me.”

For once, I thought that Negan was sincere. He was focused on his own hands, scratching at his wrists, and still he tried to smile like there had been humour in what he said, but if I looked a little more closely, I thought that he imagined himself in that hospital room all over again. He heard something that Lucille had once said. He wished to be there again.

I knew this because I had imagined myself with Dima many times over. I had worn that same smile, I had scratched myself raw.

“So, forgive yourself or keep sleeping on nails.”

He snorted. “You got some nails to spare?”

“I’m sure I can find some around here.”

“I didn’t mean it,” he said. “What I said earlier – that it was a shitty way for your boyfriend to go. I was just – I meant it like condolence.” Perhaps he saw that I did not fully understand him and he added, “That I meant I was sorry.”

I waited until he looked at me directly before I spoke. “But you did _mean_ it. Because it was a shitty way to die. It was painful. It lasted very many days. And he was brave throughout all of it. You remember that next time you want to laugh.”

“I will. I’ll remember.”

“Good. Because you would not sleep on nails. I would make you swallow them.”

He grinned.

▬

I washed beneath my armpits and between my thighs with a washcloth because there was no running water in the hotel and not much of it anywhere else. I had considered finding a stream nearby, though Negan seemed reluctant for us to even leave the hotel.

And it was fast becoming his way – no other way, not even a suggestion of one but I was damned if I would still not try to give my own.

I examined that little black dot that used to mar the flesh of my thigh, but it had softened into a shiny pink from scar-tissue. It looked much healthier than it looked the last time that I had checked it.

Like it had never happened.

▬

Perched on the windowsill of a bathroom upstairs, I studied the trees and the courtyard. There were a handful of Biters between the drooping fences. Two corpses had come from the hotel, but the rest had filtered from the trees. I pressed my back against one side of the window and my boots tucked into the other, my thumbnail held between my teeth.

I wondered how it looked from the outside; did the hotel seemed abandoned, clotted with those Biters at its front with the possibility of even more within, which would turn folks away – or would it seem much more like an _opportunity_ for the like-minded?

▬

Because surely there were people out there just like us.

▬

He was in one of the other bedrooms. He sat on a bed and spoke to Lucille very quietly. I knocked on the door like I imagined her there with him. Though he had never described her features, I dreamt of her blank face with the curve of a nose that was neither too large nor too small, but entirely plain. Her hair was not blonde, but it was not ginger, either, nor was it really very brown. Lucille was taller and smaller than me all at once. She was like another person between us, another member of our little group. I looked her over and then focused on Negan.

“Have you thought about the dead people in the yard?”

“Hello to you too, Sasha.”

“I think it makes sense if we let them stay there,” I said. “If we make it look like the courtyard was fenced off naturally and not by people.”

Lucille seemed to glance between us with her gaze of barbed wire.

Negan pursed his lips. “Why?”

“There could be two versions of us out there in the woods right now, holding rifles and bats, wondering why we have the good hotel and they have nothing. Well, how does the hotel look to them from outside? It has many Biters, sure. But not so many that you could not take care of them and enter anyway. You should want it to look like a ship out on the ocean.”

“A ship out on the ocean,” he repeated coyly. “Very descriptive.”

“I mean that it should look like something that would be difficult for you to reach,” I mumbled, more than annoyed. “It would make you tired to swim to it, make you struggle.”

“Do you always talk like this? Like, do you just sit up there waxing poetic about the best ways to kill other people?”

“There should be no killing, from us. Not if the dead are there.”

His lips were quirked into that all-familiar smile, but there was a black glint to his eye. “Not if we built our little ship,” he said. “And floated right out to sea.”

“You’re not understanding.”

“Oh, I’m understanding just fine, sweetheart. You were sitting up there just _hoping_ that some poor son of a bitch would stumble out from those woods so you could use that little rifle of yours. Just _itching_ for it, ain’t ya?”

Negan had always liked to place little winding knobs on the spines of people around him, and he turned and turned those knobs until our spines coiled together and knotted painfully in discomfort. He mocked while he turned the knob, he laughed at our faces contorted from the pain. He loosened it only when he felt like it, to let us totter forward until the knob unwound fully.

“Let me guess what put you in such a bad mood,” I said steadily. “You tried to talk to Lucille and she had enough of you.”

He licked his canines with a flash of his pink tongue that then lashed against his gums. “Come again?”

“The yard should be full of more dead people. Perhaps even in the hallway.”

“In the fucking _hallway_? So, what, they can catch us while we slip outside for a fucking piss sometime in the night, all because you got fucking bored and wanted some grand scheme to –…”

“There will be others who come for this – what we have.”

“But that doesn’t mean they’ll _get_ it. Not while I’m standing in their way.”

“You think too much of yourself.”

“Cut a man down, why don’t you. Oh, wait, you already did that – not one man, though. Many, many men who had what you wanted. Do I have something you want, Sasha? Something you would take?”

There was a disconnect between us in this bedroom, like it had become sentient and slithered between us. His smile had gnarled his face, his eyebrows seemed too heavy and pushed down into his sockets. He leaned back against the mattress, his arms spread out.

But he was careful to catch Lucille as she rolled in his grip. He held her like a lover. He held her like he saw the features of her that were lost on me.

“It would be good to go outside,” I said. “The hotel makes you feel bad.”

“Feel bad.” He snorted bitterly. “Like I’m some kid. I don’t feel _shit_. Actually, I do – _bored_. I feel so fucking _bored_.”

“Like a kid.”

His laugh left him in a wheeze. “You got me. Like a kid, all right.”

“I think you should be more afraid – more aware of what stays out there.”

“Stays out there,” he echoed.

“You sound like those little red birds. The parrots.”

“ _Polly want a cracker_?” He grinned and shook his head. “Fine. You remember how we planned taking this hotel in the first place. We played a good little game of _what-if_. So, what if? What if we let the Biters come and eat breakfast with us every damn morning, hm? Or we snuggle up to the cutest, least-rotted of the bunch every night before bed and share our deepest, darkest little secrets?”

“What if we take it seriously? What if we say that the next men that come here really are like the ones you described in your fantasy –…”

“ _It was not a fucking fantasy_. I told you, they were gonna let that fucking _rapist_ stay with them –…”

“And what if I’m afraid of those kind of people?”

His mockery faded away. I watched it drain from his face and drip into a sullenness that forced him to look away from me, transfixed by scuffed marks on the dresser across from him. “You don’t have to be afraid of those kind of people,” Negan said quietly. “The two of us, we make a good team. We could take on a lot of things together.”

“We can,” I said. “But it only works if _we_ work.”

“What do you think we should do?” he asked, his voice laced in apprehension.

I saw the willingness in his eyes; saw the glint of Lucille that lingered behind them. She spoke to me in her own way, through the curl of her wire, through the blunt dullness of her wood. She whispered all the ways to speak to him. _His moods change_ , she told me. _He isn’t always in control of them, you know._

▬

And then she said, _but you could be the one to change them if you play your cards right._

▬

In the other half of the hotel that was blocked off from us by furniture, Negan remembered that there had been another door, though he was not sure if it opened. He was certain that it led into the other part of the gardens that had become overgrown and withered because the gardener had been killed in his own greenhouse, the spikes of a rake splitting through his now blue, rotted skull.

Negan had seen the dead gardener only once. He said that he had remembered the odour of sickly flesh and dead petunias mixed together into a heady scent and it had made him gag, which was a feat for him, because he hardly seemed to notice the stench of the dead.

I suggested that we take that door and test out the back gardens, then loop around to the front and draw all the Biters back into the woods while the rods were placed outside.

▬

I pressed out the map in front of him and ignored the marks that had already been drawn out in pencil and tapped a line with its sharp point.

“I’ll lead them this way and swing back around. You put the rods on the spots that we looked at from the window, you find a way to hold them there. The Biters should get stuck on them. Then, I think this would look more natural. Like they had gotten stuck by accident, chasing something – and maybe we let the door open.”

“The front fucking _door_? Fuck, Sasha. Put a goddamn picture of us with two targets plastered right on our fucking faces.”

“Okay. Door closed, but Biters stuck in the courtyard. More behind in the other garden.”

“Fine. That, I can fucking live with.”

▬

The Biters stumbled and fell on the roots of trees that stuck from the dirt. I felt their ghostly fingertips brush the lining of my jacket and the patch of a daisy on my arm had started to peel, its edges marred by a fine brown colour that crept inward toward its centre.

I walked with my rifle, purposefully stepping over logs and passing between the trees to confuse the Biters. I had a knife in my hand, but hardly used it. There was a serenity in the forest. There was a softness in the pulpy slop that poured from the skulls of those Biters that tripped and cracked bone against bark.

▬

We propped a dresser against the front door of the hotel – or rather, the emergency-exit which had _become_ the front door. Then, we put a steel rod through the handle of the _back_ door on the other half of the hotel, returning all the furniture to its mountainous pile. That way, our side of the hotel could not be broken through with the dresser in the way and the back half of the hotel, which we did not use, would remain blocked off like it had been all along.

We returned to its ballroom for a spot of cards, having checked that the Biters impaled themselves on the rods outside. Their innards slipped out from their stomachs like wet serpents pooling onto the dirt, wrapping into a coil.

▬

For all the nights that we had spent in the hotel, he had slept on the floor with a mattress awkwardly wedged between the gap of the bed frame and the wardrobe. He had placed Lucille on top of a pillow and he liked to change the covering even if we could not really wash them. The hotel had closets full of them, and there was no question in whether she should have had taken her a third of them for herself. I had not complained about it. I cared very little about coverings for pillows and liked that it calmed him if Lucille had a spot of her own.

“Hey, Sasha?” he whispered into the night.

“What?” I mumbled sleepily.

“What did you do before this?”

I was surprised that it had taken him so long to ask. “Worked in a factory. What about you?”

“No way. A factory? Doing _what_?”

I hummed. “Big machines, sometimes they had little –…”

Negan sensed my tired struggle to find the right word and supplied it on my behalf. “Jams? Fuck-ups of some great proportion?”

“Jams and fuck-ups of some great proportion, yeah. I fixed them. I broke down boxes, too. Why are you asking now?”

“I just tried to imagine you someplace different. You know, doing normal shit, before all this.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I did lots of shit,” he said lightly. “Did you like America up until Atlanta blew up and half its population tried to eat you?”

“The nature is nice. I was not sure about your food, but my friend – he really liked sugary things and he used to eat all the candies just to try them. We told him he would have no teeth.”

“Hell, I wouldn’t mind some candy myself. Lucille used to love fudge. She had a sweet-tooth herself. How about your guy?”

I breathed in the cotton of my pillow. “He liked sweets, too. But not so much as my friend.”

“Your friend came over here with you guys?”

I heard his hesitation. “Yeah. Alyosha.”

“Alyosha,” he said, testing the name on his tongue. “Funny name.”

“Nickname,” I corrected.

Negan waited quite a while. “What happened to him?”

“What happened to everybody else.”

“You’re lying.”

I felt a stutter in my chest that burned and rushed into my cheeks in its heat. I looked out over the cliffside of the mattress at him like I had before and that stutter ran into a smooth line once I saw that there was little judgement in him.

His face resembled Lucille in its blankness and empty slots for whatever emotion I wanted to put in there myself. I was tired of being surprised by him, so I returned the favour and pushed off my blanket.

I dropped onto the mattress beside him, laying on my side and looking into his eyes.

“Why do you think I’m lying?”

Negan adjusted himself, turning onto his right side to look at me properly. There was no smiling, there was no laughter. He said, “Because I recognise it.”

I chewed at the fleshy insides of my lips and ripped off shreds. “He was with me when the bombs fell. And he was hurt very badly.”

“But he didn’t die from that, did he?”

His voice was calming in its croakiness. I felt a cold thrill dart through me, one fleeting thrill that almost curled my lips into a smile but I made myself stay blank and cool. The coolness of his stare felt the same; calming, soothing. Like he already knew that Alyosha had it coming.

He had said it in the same bored tone that he used whenever he talked about the men that had lived in this hotel and the roommate that had annoyed him and how he had taken Lucille down into the basement and bashed in that one guy’s skull before all the other guys had ganged up on him and the same way that he talked about the bars of complimentary soap that he had taken from every bedroom on our side of the hotel.

“When I told you that my Dima died from his wound, it was not really true. Alyosha – he had become very paranoid. He thought that Dima was ill like the Biters.”

“So,” Negan rasped, “he put Dima down the same way you would later put him down?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Get some sleep.”

He reached over me to pull down my blanket from the bed, tucking it around me. Then, he turned onto his other side and slumped deeper down into his own blankets. I stared at him, tracing the outline of his shoulder and the mop of his hair mussed against his pillow. I stayed on his mattress but held onto my own blankets. I turned away from him, too, so that we slept back-to-back. He never moved too close to my side. He never crossed that imagined line that knitted itself between us.

▬

He was awake when I stood in the middle of the night for the bathroom. His eyes rolled in moonlight, his hands lazily patted around for a knife to pass to me. I held it in the waistband of my pants and walked out into the hall.

▬

There was a bucket in one of the upstairs bedroom that we used to avoid the courtyard and the gardens, though it meant a disgusting job of dumping it out the window. It had been placed as far from our bedroom as we could allow without making it a difficult trek, though it helped that we had so many options in the hotel. I scrubbed at my hands with soap and a washcloth, then stepped back out into the hall.

▬

Only a few feet away from me, I noticed that a piece of the furniture piled together to block off the other half of the hotel had been moved. The gap between one chair and a broken filing cabinet had become larger. It was barely noticeable.

But _I_ had noticed it.

The staircase creaked beneath me. I tried not to burst into a run, tried not to scream for Negan, because if I had made a mistake, then he would think me irrational and mad. Paranoid, like I had used to describe Alyosha. Only we had piled that furniture together ourselves, like a game of _Jenga_ just to fit the pieces around each other. I remembered each sheet of wood and broken frame pushed into place.

I stood at the bottom of the staircase and realised that the basement door had been opened, too. I stared at it with a harsh, heavy nausea sloshing around in my stomach so violently that I seemed to move with it, turning in its crashing wave to look down the length of the hall and find Negan. I walked calmly, walked slowly.

I walked and walked, knowing all the time that there was somebody else in the hotel with us; knowing, too, that they had been there much longer than we had realised. 

▬

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you are all staying safe and wish you some happy happy holidays!! x

**Author's Note:**

> hope you liked it and again i hope you're safe and well! all the best - kaiseriin


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